This Glorious Sadness
by Covenmouse
Summary: The Shitennou live, reborn to new lives but haunted by demons of the past.  Their task is simple: they must cleanse the Earth of the Moon Princess's taint.  Part 3 of series!
1. After the Storm

**A/N**: This story is the third part in the _Their Silent Reverie_ series. In order, the two previous fics are: _Their Sweet Madness_, and _Viva la Vida_. This will make very little sense without having read at least TSM first. As the prologue to TGS, I have reiterated the final chapter of VLV. The first chapter is beneath it, after the break.

**Setting**: Canonical through SuperS. It ignores the Stars series entirely.

**Warnings**: Dark themes are touched upon, including mental disorder, emotional, physical and sexual abuse, death and murder.

* * *

><p><strong>PROLOGUE<strong>

**Mamoru**  
><em>August 2009. Tokyo, Japan<em>

They were matched blow for blow, swipe for swipe, panting breath for panting breath. How many times had they done this in jest? How many boasts had they made of the enemies that they would kill, together?

"Don't make me do this," Kunzite growled as their blades locked once more.

Hatred roared in his veins, almost drowning out his own shout: "I make you do nothing!"

The broke apart and met again. Behind him, the queen worked her magic. Selene would make this all right, Endymion knew it. Her touch would heal their minds and free them from the clutches of that demon. If only he could hold his cousin at bay...

A flash of metal as he stumbled. A searing pain through his side.

Mamoru sat up with a gasp. The panic within him died gradually, and Mamoru pressed his hand to his wildly beating heart. Reminding himself to breathe, he swung his legs over the side of the couch and put his face in both hands. It had been almost two weeks since he'd gotten a good night's sleep, since Zoe and Jun had gone missing, and being regulated to the couch didn't help matters.

"My prince." Yelping, Mamoru jumped and looked up to find Helios standing on the other side of the coffee table. The priest winced, then bowed. "Forgive me I seem to be getting that reaction quite a bit these days."

"You could warn a man," Mamoru said and groaned. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes. "What's the matter, Helios?"

"I've come to deliver a message."

Looking up, Mamoru frowned and realized for the first time just how serious Helios seemed-how sorrowful. "A message?"

"From the generals."

"Zoe, Jun-you know where they are?" Elation spread through him like a wildfire and he got to his feet. "Let me get my shoes, we need to get them back home at once."

Helios raised his hands to ward him off. "Forgive me, but you don't understand."

"Understand what?" Mamoru grabbed his coat from the rack.

"They have reclaimed their powers, and their memories. It is their intention to follow through with your father's last command." At that, Mamoru stopped, turned, and stared at Helios. The priest did not look away, but he backed a step from Mamoru.

"My father's..."

"Endymion, Prince of the Earth and to the Golden Kingdom..." Helios raised his hand, fingers outstretched. A light shown at Endymion's chest, and then sped toward the priest. His knees went weak, and his chest burned. Mamoru fell to the floor, staring up at the man who had been his priest. Upstairs, a door slammed open. "In the name of the King Aethlius-the last true king-I remove your claim to the throne and your ties to Elysion."

Usagi gasped from the stairway. She blundered down them and fell to her knees beside her husband. "For your crimes against King and country you have been found traitor, and are hereby sentenced to death."

Helios looked away, eyes closed. "Forgive me," he whispered, and vanished.

* * *

><p><strong>Ch1<strong> - _After the Storm_

**KEANU**

_He opened his eyes to stone above him and a distinct lack of darkness in the tiny subterranean chamber. Keanu took a deep breath, and held it. Slowly, evenly, he let the air out of his lungs as he willed away the faint itch of magic beneath his skin. When it had faded, and the darkness returned to its proper inky depths, he pulled himself up and his feet found the threadbare rug which did nothing to mask the chill creeping through the granite._

Shivering faintly, he reached for his blanket. His boots he'd left beside the bed, and lately he'd taken to sleeping in his clothes. Still, it was only after he'd wrapped his blanket about him that he slipped out the door and up the stair to the surface.

A fine layer of frost crunched beneath his boots as he made his way to the shrine steps. It covered everything—the granite floor, the roses, the crystal at the middle of the shrine. He pulled the blanket more tightly about his shoulders for what little good it would do.

At the head of the stair he stopped.

Fog billowed through the field beyond, so thick that it seemed as though the shrine were adrift in a grey, tempestuous sea. Every so often wildflowers would peek from beneath the clouds, but in an instant they were gone again. The soft morning light filtered through a sky which looked much the same, and there was a promise of rain lingering upon the wind that kissed his cheeks. Soon enough it would turn to snow.

"The weather hasn't changed in many years."

Pythia stepped into his peripheral vision, her robes clutched tight about her frail body. One of the two shrine maidens who had survived in the Golden Crystal with Helios, Pythia had spent the last few months acting as mother and housekeeper to the tenants of the temple. Though she looked young, yet—Keanu would have guessed no more than twenty had he not known the truth—her demeanour and grace set her apart from her sister, Dodona, who was as rowdy as any of the rest of them. More so, in fact; Keanu could no more imagine Zoe or Jun or Nick playing as others their age did, than he could imagine himself throwing away duty and responsibility to play the fool. This thought was sad, and he turned it away before it consumed him.

"What do you mean?"

"We have been awake for a long while," Pythia said carefully, her dark eyes lingering upon the fog, "As Helios has surely told you, there has not been much change since. This includes the weather—it had not rained, not once, until your friends returned. And there was nothing natural about that occurrence."

"So this...?"

"Is good." The maiden offered him a smile. "We may yet see a proper winter. It means that Elysion has begun to heal."

Pythia went back in, toward the steps that lead into the subterranean temple. Keanu watched her go, and then looked back toward the distant line of trees. Three large mounds stood a barren island in the mist. "No," he said to the wind, "It means that we have to work faster."

The pit was roughly fifteen feet wide by seven feet deep. It had taken days of tireless effort for the four of them to dig it out, and Keanu worried that it still wasn't big enough. There was no time, though—with the frost on the ground the soil had already begun to go hard. They stood on the one side which had been left clear of dirt mounds, staring down into the void below.

"It starts rainin' an' that's gonna be a deathtrap," Nick announced.

"Good thing they're already dead, huh?"

Nick gave Jun a dirty look, then spat on the ground next to his shoe. "Y'know what I meant."

"Can we not?" Zoe stuffed her hands into her pockets, and rolled her eyes. "Lets just do what we have to and get this over with. If it starts raining, we'll take a break."

As always, the three looked to Keanu. He tried not to fidget as he rubbed the back of his neck. "We'll do what we can," he said after a moment. "But we need some way to...we're going to be in close proximity with them. We'll need to cover our noses and mouths, and find gloves."

"Ain't gonna help the smell," Nick laughed sourly.

"It's not for the smell." Keanu shook his head. "I don't know how long diseases can last down there, but I'd rather not find out the hard way."

They started with the outlying fields, where the bodies had been burned so terribly that they were hardly recognizable. Without the ghosts that milled restlessly about, they never would have been able to distinguish citizen from intruder. The bodies of the fallen enemies were left where they lay—for now. One by one, the children carried out the corpses of their brethren and set them side-by side in the fresh pit.

When a layer had been laid at the bottom, they packed dirt over it and built another. Layer by layer, the pit began to fill.

From the field, the four moved inward. First were the houses where peasants had been slaughtered where they stood, then the cellars where mothers had slit the throats of their own children to save them. It was there that Zoe began to weep; still she worked on as diligently as any of her brothers-in-arms.

Next was the second battle field, fought between the village and the Noble's quarters. With each body removed came a spirit in its wake. They lined the field next to the pit, their eyes tracking every move the living made.

It was late afternoon when the rain began. During the slow drizzle, the four struggled to complete their last layer. When the mud began to suck at their boots, they climbed back out of the pit and hoisted up their ladders.

"We'll finish this tomorrow," Keanu barely muttered, but their nods indicated that they heard him. His clothes were soaked through, and there were things he didn't want to think about coating his shirt and arms. He closed his eyes and raised his face to the water. The rain ran rivulets down his body and chilled him through the bone, but not even Neptune's oceans would wash away the filth that covered him.

At the shrine he would be free of the eyes upon him, but Keanu did not return to the shrine. The others had gone on before he'd moved, and thus there was none but the dead to see him as he returned to the city before the castle. Alone, he walked between the rows of shops and houses, of broken doors and windows, of food strewn to rot in the streets. In his minds eye he saw what it had been before, with women hanging laundry on lines over the street, and vendors harking their wares on the corners. In this vision, children would run by, laughing and playing, with their dogs chasing them.

The memory overlaid itself with screams of pain, a clash of swords. Keanu stopped, eyes closed and head reeling.

"You're holding up traffic, boy," a familiar voice barked.

Hematite slapped his back, pitching Kunzite a few steps forward. He caught himself before he fell, and jogged to catch up to his father's side. They wove through the crowded streets; no man nor woman paused so much to glance at either of them, or else clear the path as they might have another noble. Kunzite did not for a moment believe that there were truly none here who marked them, but those who did were careful not to make any noise of it. In their work-worn garb they went unmolested through the streets, as any other common huntsmen might be. The Kings of the South had never insisted upon what some might call their "proper" due, not unless they were in uniform, and the people of Elysion had long grown used that tradition.

Once through the market square, Hematite slipped through a back alley and Kunzite followed with hardly a sound on the pavement to mark their footsteps. That a giant such as the old Lord could walk so soundlessly was a miracle Kunzite wondered if he'd ever know the secret of. As though reading his thoughts, Hematite glanced at his son with a crooked smile.

"Do you remember where we are?"

The alley was long, and muddy, and enclosed on two sides by towering stone buildings. Dogs were fighting somewhere nearby, and someone slopped piss out a window just shy of bathing them with it. His nose wrinkled.

"That was intentional," he muttered.

Hematite nodded, fixing the window it had come from with a disapproving eye. There was a woman scowling down at them, drawn and frail. She lifted her chin and met their gaze with no remorse for her disrespect

With a shake of his head, the giant warrior lumbered on and, after a pause, Kunzite continued in his wake. "We're..." Kunzite hesitated, and lowered his voice, "We're in the Mud Pits."

"Boy," warned Hematite with a shake of his head at the slang. Yet he did not deny it. They rounded a corner and slipped through another, shorter, alley before coming out onto a small square. Directly across from them was a tiny, beaten down shrine whose roof looked ready to cave and front door swung on a single hinge. Across the lintel someone had blacked out the circle of Gaea and re-drawn in chalk a simple crescent.

A chill ran from Kunzite's forehead to his toes. "Who—" Turning to look at his father, Keanu realized that he was alone. The wind made a lonely, appropriate noise through the tunnels of empty streets. Slowly, Keanu returned his gaze to the chapel whose door flapped lightly in the wind. Behind it was naught but a blackness so deep it made his skin crawl. Though the lintel was wet from rain, the chalk crescent still stood strong upon on it as though it had been spelled to stick. In his heart, he knew that it had been.

Under the scrutiny of a thousand unseen eyes he turned and ran.

Jun was sitting on the outer steps when Keanu approached the shrine. The blond looked up, icy blue eyes watching Keanu from beneath a screen of curls. They were wild again, Keanu noted with some unease; it was a look Jun only got when—

"Kunzite," Bachiko giggled and trotted down the steps to wrap her gangly arms about his shoulders. He caught her with his hands at her sides. Past the wall of red frizz in his face, he saw Jun stand up. The boy cast them a disgusted look, but only drifted a few steps up the stair.

The girl cooed in his ear. "You were gone. We were all so worried."

"I took a walk," he said as he pried her carefully from his person. She was much stronger than she looked, but she didn't fight him. Her eyes, dark as pitch in this incarnation, roved over him and her nose wrinkled.

"You went to that place," she hissed. Her hand cracked against his cheek, and she fled toward the stair. Keanu let her go. Putting a hand to his stinging jaw, he drudged the last few steps to Jun's side, turned, and sat. After a moment, Jun sank down beside him.

They listened to the wind rustle through the windflowers, and there came a distant roll of thunder. There'd be more rain before the morn.

"Where did you go?"

Keanu shrugged. He considered not answering, but soon found himself going on anyway, "Headed for the castle. Thought I'd just see what was out there."

None of them had dared the fortress since the first night they'd been allowed back within Elysion. Neither Nick nor Jun would so much as look in the direction of the castle, their gazes skimming across it as though it were a surface too slippery to grasp. Zoe had been briefly fascinated with the idea of returning to it, rather than living at the temple; an idea which had been curtailed the moment she'd learned the identities of the dark shapes dangling from the parapet. Eventually they'd have to remove the bodies, but Keanu figured they would breach that topic when they came to it.

Several minutes ticked by and Jun hadn't said anything else. The sky rumbled again, closer now. Jun gave a soft huff and combed one hand through his curls to push them out of his face. "What if it floods?"

"Pythia said it hasn't rained in years, so it probably won't. If it does, we'll just have to wait. Let the water absorb."

"If it hasn't rained in years, why are there things still growing?"

Keanu frowned. It hadn't occurred to him to question that, but now that Jun pointed it out..."This place doesn't respond to sense, does it?"

Jun shrugged loosely. "You could ask Helios. I don't remember this being an issue before."

Nodding slowly, Keanu pursed his lips as he tried to match what he was seeing with his memories of the past. Since Beryl had returned their minds to them, he'd had little problem recognizing things or accessing what knowledge he'd had in previous lives. This was not a trifling amount of information, but there were yet many gaps in his teachings which had been iced over as things "intrinsic of the universe."

That was the problem when you relied on culture to explain itself—concepts you believed you understood perfectly would fall apart under close inspection, as they lacked the structural support of proper education. There were fixes for this. Were Elysion live and well, he could have found the answers he needed at the castle library.

He'd seen no evidence of looting the one time he'd gone to the castle, before his memory had been returned to him, and thus could assume the library may yet be intact. Unfortunately, Keanu could not force himself to re-approach the gates where he now knew his father's body hung decomposing. Kunzite's father.

A soft patter announced the beginnings of the storm. Together the boys rose and returned to the cold shelter of the temple.

Much like an ice-burg, the complex beneath the surface shrine was quite a bit larger than the top platform suggested. Built to be as much a bunker for the priesthood and royal families as a place of worship, the Temple of Gaea was comprised of an expansive nest of tunnels and caverns which riddled the Parnassus mountains, east of the castle Valeia. The caves, which had been in place long before any there was any thought to live in them, had been carefully reshaped into hallways and rooms, so that if a person discounted the lack of windows they might think themselves in any normal castle of the period.

Poverty was a vow all clerics took before entering their order, and one which they claimed to strictly adhere—it was not _they _who owned the expensive carpets, or robes, or furniture, but the _temple_, and thus their beleaguered status was assured. Looking at the dining hall now, Keanu could not help but wonder what might the Lords and Ladies say whose funds had paid for the tapestries and silverware and heavy oaken tables which filled it. Certainly their investments had held, for nothing here was in disrepair...but it was in disuse. No longer were there candles to light the high reaches of the cavern and show the woven masterpieces that lined it. Hardly any hands existed to use the plates and cups and forks that stood in place upon tables which had not seen diners in several centuries. Only the dais, reserved for the high priestess and immediate royalty, had any lighting or persons to attend it.

Helios, Pythia, and Dodona had moved to a lower table when the quartet first arrived, he remembered with a sad smile. The trio had felt their place to be as servants, as they once might have been. To Keanu's surprise, it had been Bachiko who had convinced them to stay. While the others tried to use persuasion, she merely ordered the three to remain exactly as they were. Then, she served them tea. It wasn't even poisoned.

For all that Bachiko had her moments of crazy, as his stinging cheek reminded him, Keanu had to admit that the girl had come far in the few weeks they'd spent in Elysion. Tonight she sat by Helios, and he didn't seem to mind that she treated him as though he were still a child under her care. Keanu jerked his gaze away before the priest noticed his staring.

Helios didn't speak much these days. He was still kind and polite, even friendly, to them all, but something had changed in him after he'd gone to Endymion.

"Pythia," said Jun, "What did you mean that it hasn't rained in years?"

All other conversation stopped. Pythia glanced between Jun and Keanu, for a moment seeming lost as to who she'd said that to, then her eyes settled on the King of the East. "Exactly as I said, my lord."

Keanu cleared his throat. If Jun noticed his annoyance—and Keanu doubted there was much emotion Jun wouldn't take note of—the boy didn't seem at all uneasy for it. "There just don't seem to be any signs of a drought," he said to all three of the clerics, "If this is the first time in years, shouldn't everything be dead?"

A high-pitched, goblin giggle arose from Bachiko's end of the table. She collapsed against Helios, who let her bury her head upon his shoulder. Dodona gave the girl a perplexed look.

"I'm afraid I can't offer much of an explanation," Helios said after a long moment. He sipped his drink, and wetted his lips. "I told you that there's much about what is going on which I don't understand. This event is, after all, unprecedented. We three have spent our time studying as much as we could, around tending to our own survival."

"Shit, man, we get it," Nick grumbled. "You don't fuckin' know for sure, but you got a guess so give it." Then he cursed, and Keanu suspected from her glare that Zoe had kicked his ankle.

Helios coughed slightly. "Well. From speaking with our...esteemed priestess—"

Bachiko giggled a little more loudly.

"—I believe what you suspected is true, that the Ginzushou is what blocked you from Elysion in your second, ah, lives."

Keanu nodded. "Beryl got us as close as she could before that attempt..."

As content as the others with talking around the elephants in the room, Helios merely nodded in kind. "That which was blocking you out is also blocking Elysion in, so to speak. Elysion has always had a shield, of course, to protect it from outside interference. But it was altered by a foreign contaminant, and used to completely seal Elysion from even the flow of time. Much like the way that we three were purposely put into stasis, in the Crystal itself."

"Wouldn't that kill it, though?" Zoe drug her feet up into her chair and wrapped her arms about her knobbly knees. She tipped her cheek upon them and gazed through her eyelashes at Helios. "The energy of the earth, it's balance, is what keeps Elysion alive. Isn't it?"

"That's the simple version, yes," Helios said slowly, "The governmental structure was founded on the very real need to keep to the innate mystical forces of the earth in check, in order to maintain the—" He cut himself off with a shake of his head. "I'm getting ahead of myself."

"Take your time." Keanu set his goblet of water down and leaned forward, fingers steepled. "I remember the songs in the shrines, and the lessons we were all given, but to be honest these were more things that I knew by rote, not...not understanding."

His fellows about the table nodded in kind and Helios sighed. "I was only nine when this—"

"I know how old you were," Keanu cut him off, perhaps a little too sharply, and he winced. "Helios, please. We need your help."

Pythia placed a hand over Helios', but it was Dodona who spoke, "Queen Beryl, why don't you explain it?"

Bachiko looked up, and the giggling stopped cold. Before any could object, she sat upright and straight, and all traces of herself slipped away.

"Explain?" Beryl's eyes flickered among the group of them. Jun, who until now had been sitting languid next to Nick, went taunt as a bowstring.

Keanu met Beryl's gaze evenly. "We were wondering if you could explain to us in detail the power structure of Elysion and it's importance."

The queen rolled her eyes and reached for Helios' drink. She set is aside again after swallowing a fair portion. "You children were never inclined to your studies, were you?"

Despite the exasperation in her voice, there was a tease in the smile she favoured him with. "If you truly cannot remember..."

"We can't," Jun spat.

Beryl's eyebrows shot toward her dark roots, below the puffy nest of frazzled hair. She stared at him only a moment before shaking her head. "Remember, if you will, that all life exists because of the flow and ebb of energy within our planet. It fuels us—animal, plant, mineral—and shuttles us through the cycle of life. My favorite of the metaphors for this was always water. Rivers, specifically. All rivers are composed of currents—the Earth has _four_, which correspond to the four cardinal points."

As a man of science, and Keanu did consider himself to be such, this made little sense. Yet his memory argued that it had once seemed perfectly reasonable. While the war of logic waged within him, Beryl continued.

"Naturally, the power structure of Elysion mimics that from whence it came. Four cardinal points," she paused for significance, and favoured them all with a smile, "and the fifth who represents the Earth itself to hold them, like the earth holds a river.

"Without this balance, the Earth heaves and sours...or floods. So, too, will Elysion."

"But this power structure only mimics," Zoe said, lifting her head. "It has nothing to do with the Earth."

"Ah." Beryl chuckled softly, and a shiver ran up Keanu's spine. The goblin giggles of Bachiko did nothing to move him, but the cold smile upon Beryl's lips... "But there is power in mimicking, is there not? We humans have so few natural abilities, or defenses. We make daggers and swords in place of claw or fang, shoes and clothing in stead of pad or fur, we wear jewels in place of feathers. And when it comes to magic, perhaps it is not so much that we were made to the ability, but that we were fastened to it. Somewhere, far down the line, the mimic—the apprentice—became both the master, and the slave."

She gave a soft sigh and leaned back in her chair, with Helios' cup still clutched in hand. "No, child, it has everything to do with the Earth. It is us, you see, and we are it. We have forced it to be so."

A hint of dread, not unlike the itch of magic, wormed beneath his skin. "Are you suggesting that the Earth is out of balance?"

The girl's eyes glinted red in the candlelight. "I am saying it is so," Beryl replied smoothly, "You have made it thus."

Zoe frowned. "We haven't done anything."

"Mam-Endymion," said Helios. His voice was but a whisper, but that name was like a lightning bolt to everyone at the table. The priest stared at his plate.

"Yes, Endymion," giggled Beryl, who sounded more like Bachiko for a moment. Then her grin faded and she looked again to Keanu. "The high king exists to hold the power, to anchor it in it's place. Without him...or _her_..."

"No." Beryl and Jun stared at one another again, the latter beginning to tremble ever so slightly.

Keanu frowned. What Beryl was saying struck a chord with the memories buried inside of him. Old lessons about Gaea and her gifts to man, about her tying their dreams and powers to kingdom of Elysion. He'd had it drilled into his head that the balance must always be maintained, no matter what. What would happen if wasn't?

"There must be another way to fix it," he muttered.

"Oh there is, princeling. Someone tried it before, did they not?" Beryl leaned forward again, her gaze fastened to his own. "Would you sever our ties to the Mother, as those demons would? Have us return to worshiping the false goddess, and kiss the toes of her whelp?"

Before he could answer, Pythia whispered, "Severing our magic would kill us."

"I'm not killing _anyone_," Keanu said.

"Anyone?" They all looked to Helios, who in turn was staring at Keanu. The priest's voice was so small, so...hopeful...

Keanu stood and marched from the room. Distantly, he heard Zoe say, "No. Let him go."

That night his sleep was tormented by dreams he didn't remember, and in the morning it was still raining. Though the hatch that lead to the shrine proper was sealed against weather, they could hear the howl of wind and rain beyond it. It sounded like wolves, or banshees.

"I guess we get to sleep in," he muttered to the others and turned from the door. It wasn't that he missed the looks they exchanged, it was that there was nothing he could do about it. He didn't dare ask them if, standing there, they felt the same stirring of power within their veins, the same sense of slipping upward, into the storm.

No matter how his eyes itched and bones ached, Keanu refused to return to bed. Instead, he walked past it, and the dining hall, and through the first door he didn't recognize. It took him to foreign hallway after foreign hallway, and fairly soon he was so turned about that he couldn't have retraced his steps if he'd wanted to.

Despite knowing how large the temple was—at least, having a rough idea of it—Keanu hadn't considered that it would have a library. That was an oversight. Of course a temple would have a library. Historically, religion and education tended to roll hand in hand; being a member of clergy, or a noble granted leave to study with them, was usually the only method of obtaining any sort of scholarship. Granted, whatever knowledge was available was often tainted by the religion's views upon morality, creation, and whatever else they felt was too "obvious" to need factual backing, but it was still knowledge. Usually there would be some form of useful information one could extrapolate, if you kept in mind the context of the author.

It was very dark this far within the temple. The three who'd lived here the past several years seemed to keep to within only a handful of the tunnels, and Keanu couldn't blame them. Not everyone was a veritable glow worm, and they were limited in supplies.

Everything here was covered in a fine layer of dust. Spiderwebs appeared frequently, and in a dorm off of one of the halls, Keanu found a section of floor which had begun to form small spires reaching up to similar ones hanging from the ceiling. A pool of water had formed around the base, and the steady drip, drip drip from above lent an eerie music to the old temple. Whatever magic was keeping the rest of Elysion from aging didn't seem to be quite so strong here. The mountain was reclaiming itself.

"It's dangerous down here."

Helios had stopped at the door, watching him. The horn on his forehead glowed a soft golden light. Unlike the kind Keanu emitted, this cast shadows down through Helios' bangs and threw his eyes into dark recesses. Keanu resisted a shiver. "I was trying to find the library...how did you know where I was?"

"I didn't, exactly." Shrugging, Helios took another step into the room and Keanu thought he might have been looking at the stalagmites. "This is my home. I know its passages much more intimately than you ever did. And you left a trail." He gestured loosely behind him to a collection of footprints left in the dust of the corridor.

"You said it's dangerous...?"

"Yes." There was a pause, and then Helios said, "Maybe. I admit, there are areas we've not explored since we woke, and these are a part of why."

Looking at the structures himself, Keanu nodded briefly. "The lower the caves go, the harder they are to air out, even in the best of times," Helios said faintly. "I dared not waste the energy to clear them when there was no need to go so far down."

Keanu chewed his bottom lip. He nodded again and stuffed his hands into his pockets. "Can you show me the library?"

After a moment, Helios nodded and turned to lead Keanu back through the tunnels. Some of the passages he was lead through had marks where Keanu had been there before, but the further they went the less derelict the temple became.

"How will you fix this?"

Startling, it took Keanu a moment to recover from the sudden question, and the accusing tone. Helios had not turned to look at them, but there was a defensive stiffness to the boy's shoulders and stance. The realization that he yet thought of Helios as a boy struck Keanu suddenly and he found himself smiling. He was glad for the dark.

"I told you I'm not going to...to sever us from the Earth's magic," Keanu repeated slowly. "I'm not killing any of us."

"I know." Helios stopped before a small, wooden, iron strapped door. He turned to face Keanu, and between them their magic was strong enough to see one another's faces.

They were of an age, now; physically, at least. This jarred with Keanu's memories of the chubby-cheeked baby he'd held, the toddler he'd been forced to hand over to the priests, the growing boy he'd visited every chance his duties allowed. And the sadness that was there, the accusations hidden behind those golden eyes in which he'd once seen naught but love and joy. He forced away a sudden urge to hold the boy, to plead with him for his trust.

"We have to restore balance, don't we?" Keanu searched those eyes, praying for some kind of redemption. "That's why it was so important that there be a proper successor, someone who can represent the Earth. If we keep it out of balance, Elysion will..."

"Dissolve to chaos, in theory," Helios supplied. "It hasn't yet, because of the stasis it was under. That's why it hadn't rained, why the bodies never fully decomposed, why more of the buildings have not gone to ruin."

"But that stasis was slipping."

"Yes."

Helios pushed the door open and snapped his fingers. Four candelabra lit themselves in the chamber beyond. Keanu stopped just over the threshold, unable to mask some amount of disappointment. A part of him, the modern part he supposed, had been expecting shelves upon shelves of books—at least a thousand. What he got was a small chamber with two walls worth of books and three long tables with benches in the middle of the room.

One table had a map strewn on one end, a short stack of pulled books at the other, and a collection of quills, paper, and ink jars in its middle. Other than that, it was quite obvious the room had seen little use in recent times.

If Helios noticed his disappointment, he said nothing.

Keanu pulled a book from the nearest shelf and opened it. The pages were covered in tiny, precision perfect handwriting. He skimmed through the first few passages before he realized it was a diary of some kind, apparently written by a priest.

"That would be journal of the first abbot of Delphi," Helios said. "It's concerned primarily with recipes for mead, and bad poetry."

Looking up to find those golden eyes on him again, Keanu nodded and shelved the book. He rubbed his sinuses with his thumb and index finger and sat upon a nearby bench. "Are there any regarding where our magic stems from? Or better yet, on the moon kingdom?"

"Yes, and not exactly." Helios went to another shelf, reached up and drew a fat tome from the second highest shelf. He brought it over and set it reverently on the table next to Keanu. "Though these are stories you...your past self should have known."

The priest flipped through the heavy linen sheets, each painted in ornate scenes not unlike the illuminated manuscripts of the middle ages. Keanu was fairly certain the Christian monks had stayed clear of subjects such as goddesses and nude water-women, though.

Finally, Helios laid the book open. On the left-hand page was a depiction of a woman with brown skin and green hair. She had flowers twined into her braids; they were so long that her hair spread to every edge of the page. Her hands were extended and cupped around a sphere, upon which was drawn what looked to be an ancient map of the earth. There was only one continent on it, whose shape roughly resembled the sketches of Pangaea he'd seen in science textbooks. This, Keanu's senses told him, was Old in the same way as the caves they lived in.

On the right-hand page began the legend in a careful, blocky script, "Gaea, the mother of us all..."

As Keanu read through the mythology, Helios went to his workstation on the other side of the room for the stack of books he'd left there. His notes soon followed, but the map stayed where it had been.

Keanu got through a sketchy story about Gaea's sister, Selene, attempting to subvert the Earth into her worship before he closed the book with a sigh. Such an event had occurred, but it was in his-Kunzite's-own lifetime, not eons before. Or perhaps the witch had tried it twice. He didn't want to know. "You said something about the Ginzushou?"

Helios nodded and page of careful notations he'd taken. "I said there wasn't 'exactly' anything on the Moon Kingdom. There are mentions of things, mostly scattered through journals of priests who have dealt with them. It was through these that I was able to deduce what was going on, and learn to recognize the...the taint within the shield."

That was sketchy at best. Keanu glanced over the notes, then frowned. "You've...she was here. They were here."

The priest fidgeted. "Yes. I told you about the witch, Nehelenia, who had escaped her prison and desecrated Elysion. Further."

As he flipped through the pages, Keanu hummed. "Right...wait. Nehelenia was..."

Keanu looked up to find Helios staring pointedly at the table. As he watched, the priest picked up a book and flipped hastily through its pages. "The priestess who tried to steal the Golden Crystal."

The firelight flickered along the horn which sprouted from Helios' forehead. Keanu was reminded how, only a few weeks prior, it had seemed so strange to see a boy with such a growth upon him. Now, it was probably the most normal thing about the boy. And a reminder of...

"But mother..."

Helios set his book down with a faint clatter and shook his head. "No. Mother tried to kill her. She didn't...didn't succeed. Nehelenia was merely sealed away into the sort of stasis—"

"—That apparently everyone ever gets put into," Keanu snapped. This was followed by a groan, and he rubbed his sinuses in an attempt to relieve a sudden pressure. "But she was defeated this time?"

"Yes. It was close, though, and there weren't many around to stop her...except the Princess."

Sighing, Keanu looked at the boy sitting across the table from him. It occurred to Keanu that Abida had left him well defended against all but the most skilled of guilt trips, and Helios had a long way to go, yet, if he thought to break Keanu's resolve. Abida. Mother. His mother.

"So they came here, defeated Nehelenia, and..." Looking down, Keanu skimmed the notes over once again, "That was when the break down began."

"Yes," Helios said. "It was Nehelenia that woke us from our slumber in the first place. Had she not interfered, we might have stayed within the crystal indefinitely. Her tampering drew us from it, and then she imprisoned us elsewhere. Thankfully, the temple's shields were still in place. She was unable to break through them."

The priest hesitated, his fingers toying with the cover of a journal. "She may have gotten me to unlock them, had my time in the crystal not strengthened my bond with it. Using meditation techniques, I was able to separate my consciousness from my body and retreated back into crystal itself. From there, I reached out to the minds of those connected to it."

Keanu frowned. "You mean you can—"

"Beryl taught me."

That was cause for no small amount of unease. The woman was still here, in the shrine, and if she could...Keanu refused to pursue that thought any further. "Alright. So you went, ah, mind hopping?"

"So to speak." Still toying with the journal, Helios' eyes did not raise from it as he continued on, "I was relieved to find the prince that way, but his mind is shielded against such intrusions. I also found four tenuous connections near to him, but they were so light I dared not to try them. There was another, though, and through it I was able to reach out for help."

A sick dread rolled through Keanu's stomach, this time having nothing to do with Beryl. Someone else, beyond the shitennou, who had been close to Endymion, and with a tie to the Earth's core? Helios would not look up, no matter how long Keanu stared at him, and he knew he'd get no answer even if he were to ask.

"And so you let them into Elysion."

"Let," Helios muttered. "The prince had his own doorway here, as did you. I merely showed him how to find it."

Now Helios looked at him, but it was only to glare. Biting back the reprimand he yearned to give, Keanu tore his gaze from the priest's, and stared at a candelabra on the far wall. "At what point did you realize it was the Ginzushou responsible for the lock upon Elysion?"

"Shortly after Nehelenia was sealed. After...After I had seen it in action, I was able to distinguish the power traces from the Earth's."

That was a lie. Keanu knew it as surely as he knew that Helios still aligned himself with Endymion, no matter that they had established the "prince's" guilt in the matter. Perhaps Helios thought Endymion changed. Perhaps the moon witch had already extended control over him. That would certainly jive with the pieces missing from Helios' story. Either way, it no longer mattered, save for the sick thought that his own brother might hate him. Kunzite's brother. Bah.

Despite the holes, the basics of the report were true. However the information had been gathered, Helios had good reason to suspect the Ginzushou to be responsible for the seal. Distantly, Keanu remembered again the conversations he'd had Beryl pertaining to the barrier between them and the center of their—-her—power. It was only after her careful examination of it that she'd turned her attentions upon the crystal and it's bearer.

Helios allowed him to take the book back to his cell, along with a handful of others. No matter their unease with one another, the priest did seem to sense Keanu's respect for books, at the very least. Keanu put the stack on one end of his straw-stuffed mattress, sat on the other, and turned on his inner glowworm.

He was partway into a diary—the first volume in a series by a young acolyte who would, according to Helios, become a high priestess of the realm—when there was a knock at the door. "Come in."

Zoe peeked inside, then slipped through the door and shut it behind herself. She was wrapped in a blanket, much as he had been that morning, and she paused to stand at the foot of his mattress. The girl blinked rapidly, and he thought her eyes might be adjusting. It always seemed to take a minute or two before the lack-of-darkness extended to anyone but him. Even now, he wasn't entirely clear on how it worked, only that it did.

"Books?" She looked down at the stack, and he nodded.

"I thought I'd do some research." Scoffing slightly, Zoe's lips twisted into a brief smile. She fidgeted in place, then shoved the books toward the wall so she could sit. Keanu shut the diary. "What's up?"

"I wanted...I wanted to know what you're thinking."

"About?"

Taking a deep breath, Zoe held it a moment. She had one of her wrists in hand, and was rubbing her thumb over the scars across her veins. Keanu didn't think she realized she was doing that, and decided it was best not to point it out. Eventually, she said, "What Bach—Beryl was saying at dinner last night. And other stuff. You were upset."

He rested the back of his head against the cool stone behind him. "I don't know. There's a lot of this I'm still not making sense of, to be honest. The memories are there but they're...parts of them are vague, distorted. Like trying to remember the details of your first day of kindergarten. It's too far in the past."

There was a hesitation to Zoe's nod, and he said before she could reply, "You don't agree."

"Well...'agree' isn't really the term," Zoe said slowly, "But it's not exactly, ah, like that. For me. Some of it is, but other times there's these...it's as if I'm..."

"Back there?" She met his eyes then, and for a moment they were green. Keanu sighed. "I have them too. The hallucinations, I guess you'd call them. They don't really help so much as..."

"Yeah."

Keanu pursed his lips. "From what I've been reading...do you remember the story of Gaea, and how she crowned the original Kings?"

"Yeah. She split her power between them, so that the people of Earth would rule themselves under their own free will."

"And from those kings came the five noble houses, from which the successors are chosen," Keanu said slowly, more for his own benefit than hers. There was something nagging at him about this, but he shoved the doubt away. Old legends like these always sounded a little incomplete, he thought, the truth would always be diluted and distorted through time.

"One from each house must sit in order to maintain the balance that keeps the Earth's powers in check," Zoe continued. "Oh. We have to replace..."

"Yeah." Keanu rubbed his face. "That's what Beryl was on about, and she thinks it should be her. She's done it before, after all."

The girl snorted distastefully. "No. That's—after all of this? No freaking way!"

Jun had had much the same reaction, Keanu thought. He put the diary he'd been reading aside and sat up straighter. "Who then? We need someone adequately blooded of the Central house, who can use magic. The priesthood doesn't exist to choose from anymore, and if there are still mages among the common folk, they're so scattered we'll spend ages looking for one."

Zoe frowned and bit her lip. He could see the anger in her shoulders, her hands clutching at her arms. "I don't like it."

"I know," he sighed. "I don't either. But..."

"We have time." Keanu met her eyes, and they pleaded with his. "It won't go wrong immediately, right?"

"I...don't know." He got up and paced in the small space available. "Helios mentioned the Ginzushou at the table, remember?"

"Something about that, yeah."

"Well, Beryl mentioned it before. Back at D-Point."

A glance at Zoe told him that she remembered. It would be hard to forget that blasted rock—Beryl had been driving them all insane looking for it. He resisted the dark humour that thought brought with it. "She wanted it because that's what was blocking us out of Elysion. It had tied its power to the natural barriers of Elysion, and sealed Elysion off from the rest of the planet—"

"And put it into the stasis mode thing, yeah, I know." Zoe rolled her eyes. "Helios told us that earlier, what about it?"

"The barrier is still there, sort of. It's weak now; it's let us through, and it's let the rains come again. Soon enough it'll fail altogether and this place will be completely open."

Zoe leaned back on her hands. "So? The Moon Kingdom is destroyed. They can't invade again."

He stopped and looked at her. "Yeah, but the modern world can. Besides, the barriers have a secondary function—a dam, against the currents of energy. It's a back up, to keep the high king and, well, us, from being overwhelmed in the event of sudden fluctuations."

"Like the death of a king, and no chosen heir," Zoe said softly.

Keanu sighed and nodded. "Yeah. Elysion is already sick from having been...dormant so long. If all this power spills everywhere, and the barriers fail completely...Even if we had a proper king to anchor it back to the Earth while the we get the barriers up again, it'd be like—like—"

He fumbled for an appropriate metaphor. Zoe found one first. "Over feeding someone who was starved. Too much too soon and their body rejects it."

Suddenly exhausted, Keanu nodded. "Yeah. Exactly. Which is why the Kings exist in the first place. To make sure this doesn't happen."

Flopping back down onto his end of the mattress, he stared up at the ceiling and for a moment they were left in darkness again. He felt, rather than saw, Zoe shift over next to him. Then her hair brushed his neck as she laid down beside him.

Finally, out of the darkness, she said, "You really ought to talk to Jun."

"Why?"

"Just...do it, okay?"

After a moment, Keanu nodded. Zoe stayed there with him awhile longer.

The pit was roughly fifteen feet wide by seven feet deep. It had taken days of tireless effort for the four of them to dig it out, and now it was a swimming pool. With corpses.

There was a prickling on the back of Keanu's neck which had everything to do with the legions of spirits staring at them. They were expressionless to the last, but he imagined hatred radiating from them like a fog.

"I think we made stew," said Nick. Zoe punched his arm.

In hopes to forestall any fighting, Keanu said, "We'll have to wait for it to dry up." The last thing he wanted was to have to fish either of them out of that mess. Shuddering, he turned from the sight and headed back for the shrine. The others followed.

Jun jogged to catch up to him. "We're just going to leave them like this?"

"You want to just throw the others in on top of that?"

"No, but—" Jun stopped, and so did Keanu. The boy chewed his bottom lip, blue eyes flickering over the spirits still visible beside their sodden grave. "We can't just leave them. Every day they get worse."

Keanu looked in turn to Zoe then Nick, neither of whom would meet his eyes. Carding one hand through his hair—it was getting shaggy, and he really wanted to cut it—Keanu sighed. "What do you propose we do? We can't dig in this mud, we can't throw them in that. All that's left are funeral pyres and you..."

The mere mention made Jun shudder and he closed his eyes. For a moment the boy's form overlaid with his former self—with the horror of scar tissue and pain Mars had left him. "I can deal. I should have in the first place. Lets just get this done, okay?"

"No." Zoe grasped Jun's shoulder and scowled at him. He flinched away from her, so she looked to Keanu instead. "They've waited centuries already. They can wait a few more days."

Nick scoffed, but Zoe glowered him into silence. "I'm sorry, and I want to help them, too, okay? But we have bigger problems to deal with."

"Like what?"

Zoe looked to Keanu, who nodded. He straightened his shoulders and took a deep breath. Before he could start, his eyes landed on the spirits not too far from them. He turned and looked at the shrine behind them, then to the west where laid the castle. "Not here."

The other boys looked confused, but they followed as Keanu led them to the forest.

A couple hours later the four were sitting at the end of an old pier, their feet dipped into the waters blow. Jun and Nick had listened in relative silence to Keanu's explanations of what was to come, and now sat in contemplation of it. Finally, Jun put his hands in his face, elbows on his knees, and let out a slow breath.

"You really wanna crown that loon?" Nick scratched his neck. "She already fucked it up twice."

"Technically, she didn't." Keanu leaned back on his hands and closed his eyes as he let the sunlight bathe his face. "The first time was my fault, and the second she didn't get much chance."

"It was not," Zoe said sharply.

"You weren't there," Jun muttered. Zoe scowled at the three of them, then jerked her gaze off to the end of the river. Before the awkward could settle, Jun continued in a normal volume, "It still wasn't your fault, though, Ken. There wasn't any good solution."

"Sure," said Keanu. He didn't want to argue about it. "The answer is 'no', I don't want to crown her. She's...forgive me, but she's fucking nuts. I don't know what we're going to do with her, but I'm not allowing her to rule."

"Great." Nick chewed a piece of long grass he'd picked up somewhere when they'd been walking. "What's plan B?"

"Nonexistent."

"Even better."

Keanu got up and began to pace the length of the pier. Nick turned his head to watch them, but otherwise the three didn't move. "We need someone of royal descent, who has the ability for magic, who is not insane, and, most importantly, is on our side. That doesn't leave a lot of options."

"Don't sound like it leaves any options," Nick snorted.

"Helios." They all looked to Jun, who lifted his head enough to meet their gazes. "Your mother was Princess Alcyone, wasn't she? He was Kunzite's brother. That makes him a Prince of the Central house, same as Kunzite was."

Keanu nodded, and hung his head. "Yes, but we can't use him. As I said, we need someone who is on our side."

"Helios dethroned En-Ma-the traitor," Zoe protested with hardly a hiccup. "He believes we're right. What more—"

"He believes that King Aethlius disowned Endymion," Keanu interjected, "But I don't think he believes in Endymion's guilt. Subtle difference though that may be, it still makes his alignment questionable. If it were just us that had to deal with it, I'd take the chance, but..."

They looked as one to the castle, as though it, too, were a participant in this conversation. Perhaps it was.

Zoe sighed. "You, then."

"Me?" For a moment, Keanu stood staring at her, speechless. Then he shook himself bodily, like a dog might shake water.

"Yeah," Nick seconded, "Why not? You were the heir. You shoulda taken it to begin with."

"Back then. There's no way to tell that I'm of the proper house now."

"You could try," said Jun, "By that reasoning there's no way to tell that Beryl is, either."

He was outnumbered, Keanu realized with a start. They weren't going to back down.

And they were right. Though the idea made his stomach churn, he found himself nodding. "Alright. I'll try."

Zoe and Jun left together, back to the shrine he supposed. What tension Jun had gained at the idea of re-crowning Beryl had faded as soon as Keanu had agreed to take it instead. The edict Zoe had levied against him the night before replayed in his mind. Yet another thing to worry about, he sighed.

Keanu had resumed his seat at the end of the pier, and Nick appeared to be taking a nap stretched width-wise across the middle of it. It was peaceful out here. Laying back, Keanu pillowed his head in his hands and closed his eyes to the brilliant blue sky overhead. Somewhere in the woods birds sang, and the river swayed the pier gently as it babbled by. He hardly noticed the footsteps traveling up the pier.

The board beneath his head creaked, and Keanu sat up with a yelp. Turning about, he looked up to find no one there, and no Nick on the pier. Slowly, his pulse resumed a normal rate. "Nick?"

There was no sign of the boy down either side of the bank, and Keanu frowned. A fish bumped his foot and he looked down into the hollow sockets of a young girl, grinning up at him from beneath the surface of the river.

He pulled his feet from the water and stood up to stare in horror at the thousands of bodies churning in the water. Ghostly giggles flew upon the wind, kissing his cheek and threatening to blow him from the pier.

As he backed his way toward the shore, bony fingers clutched at the edge of the pier. Water dripped from the child's corpse as she pulled herself from the water, a grin vivid on her face.

"You promised!" The wind screamed.

He turned to run, and promptly fell over Nick.

"Gah!" The other boy shoved him off and rolled over to get onto his feet. "The fuck, man?"

"I..." Keanu paused.

In the distance birds chirped, and the water lapped at the pier beneath him. There was no child, no corpses what so ever, and Nick crouched on the pier, staring at him. Thunder-heads bellowed to the south.

Shaking his head, Keanu climbed to his feet. "Fucking ghosts," he muttered, and Nick nodded.

There were two routes back to the temple: down the river, over a bridge, and back up through the naked forest, or go through the town and up the cliff-side path. It took less time to go through town, but they had mostly been avoiding that. With dark, rolling clouds encroaching from the south, however, Keanu and Nick silently agreed to chance the town, even if it meant dealing with more pissed off specters and hallucinations. At this point, that was even beginning to seem normal.

The path they were on wound its way past the destroyed gardens at the back of the castle, and into the nobles' quarter. They were spared the sight of the corpses hanging from the castle gate by a conveniently placed monolith of a house which had once belonged to the Kingdom of the North. Technically, it still did, though Zoe seemed to hold no interest in reclaiming it.

Keanu dimly remembered having spent a week's vacation at the house, and getting lost more than once in the network of hidden hallways built into it by a paranoid architect. Zoisite had teased him for a fortnight after.

It was also where they'd found a copy of the proclamation, signed by King Aethlius, which removed Endymion from the royal line. No one had wanted to brave the castle for the original, and the previous King of the North, Kalunite, had kept meticulous records in his personal library. Fortunately, Helios accepted their word once he saw the king's seal. Keanu swallowed hard at the memory of the boy's face gone ashen, and the way he'd winced away from the parchment as though it'd bite.

All the houses along this lane were lined by high, ivy laden walls. Above them stared open windows into the homes of the highborn, foreign officials, and certain merchants whose money had lofted them to title. From time to time, at the corner of his eye, Keanu would see faces staring out at them, alerting him to which homes held bodies they'd need to remove.

Rain had washed away much of the stink, though Keanu knew it would only be temporary. If winter did come, as Pythia seemed to think it would, then maybe they'd be relieved of the worst of it for awhile. Long enough to burn everything. If he could get Zoe to agree to that.

He'd just begun to register a faint itch underneath his skin, a sign he was beginning to recognize as a warning of magic in the area-either by his own doing or another's-when Nick muttered, "That's coming in fast." Keanu glanced at the other boy, who was watching the sky. A gust of wind slammed against them hard enough that both boys stumbled backward several steps. Nick cursed.

"Come on." After a quick tug on Nick's arm, Keanu took off at a run. He wasn't as fit as Kunzite had been. Keanu hadn't been trained in sprinting in armour, or sparring for hours, or anything more than a few hours of mulching; he was beginning to regret his lack of athleticism.

They made it over the bridge into the merchant sector before the first crack of lightning lit the sky and cause Nick to shy to a halt. Several steps ahead, Keanu turned when he noticed and found the other boy staring at the grey haze of rain in the distance. A haze which was speeding toward them.

There was a shop to Nick's left. Getting wet wasn't too worrisome, but the lightning and strange itch under Keanu's skin had him worried. He didn't want to be caught out in the storm. Hesitating only a moment longer, he strode back to his friend's side, grabbed Nick's arm, and drew him into the abandoned shop. The door shut just as a curtain of rain dropped outside of it.

Immediately, Nick shook his shaggy head and knotted his fingers into his hair. "Sorry, man, I..."

Keanu waved a hand at it, and moved further into the room. Immediately he'd begun to glowworm, and he lacked the will to be annoyed at it this time.

They found themselves in a jeweler's shop and, to his relief, there was a distinct lack of corpses in the main room. Broaches and necklaces hung from pegs on the walls, or on display on shelves. Each piece was unique, and there weren't many. At the back was a work bench, and a stool before it. Several wicked-looking tools were laid out over the dust-covered table, lined up neatly over top a worn piece of linen. Keanu could imagine the old shop keeper putting things in their place for a night, maybe an assistant tidying up after him, assuming they'd be back to work again in the morning as always.

Lightning cracked, casting Nick as a silhouette against the shop's single window. Itching at one arm, Keanu carefully perched himself on the stool. "I guess we have to wait."

Nick scrubbed at one arm as well, the move seemly unconscious as he stared at the shelves. Then, with a great huff, the boy put his back to the window and sat upon the floor. "Can ya knock off the glowy?"

Closing his eyes, Keanu bowed his head a moment and took a deep breath. Wind howled like a banshee through the streets and rattled the window over Nick's head. Keanu blanked the distraction from his mind and concentrated on exhaling as slowly as possible. This time the itch never lessened, but when he opened his eyes again the shop was dark save for intermittent flashes of lightning.

So much noise surrounded them that he was a little surprised when he heard Nick say, "With everything what's happened, ya wouldn't think all this is still a big fuckin' deal."

"Hm?"

"Kings and crowns and fuckin' politics." Nick tapped a heel loosely against the floor. _Thunk, thunk, scrape, thunk._ "Ain't nothin' left to rule. Ain't no people need us to rule. What the fuck should it matter what house we come from or don't?"

Sitting forward with his elbows on his knees, Keanu nodded his head lightly and braided his fingers under his chin. "Yeah. I wouldn't think it did either, man, but...Dammit, I don't know, ok?"

The next flash of lightning briefly revealed Nick staring at him. _Thunk, thunk, thunk._ In another instant it was dark again and Keanu was grateful for that. "Mm, a'ight. I just don't think we should get too caught up on that, y'know? No more nobles to feel slighted, no more rules about dress or speech or what you can fuckin' say to a guy. No offense, but you being king don't mean jack to me. You'd still be...you."

Chuckling softly, Keanu gave a brief nod.

"Kinda don't sit right," Nick continued slowly, "This whole 'king' business. King'a what? King of a ghost town. King o' gouls. King'a the slaughtered inn-" He heaved a sigh. "That ain't the point, I guess. S'more, y'know, why's it matter who does what? Y'put Beryl on a throne. Ain't a throne of anything."

"I see your point," Keanu said a minute later, "Maybe it shouldn't matter. Maybe we could just let her have her throne, placate her, and move on with the barriers in place." Sighing faintly, Keanu closed his eyes. "She _does _have experience, however limited. It's more than I do. But I thought you were against her. Why didn't you bring this up before?"

_Thunk, thunk, tap, thunk._ "Jun."

Thunder growled above them. "You know what's going on there?"

"Nah." A hesitation and lightning flash later, Nick continued, "He don't trust her. Not like any of us do, but, eh, it's more'n that. Edgy, kinda. Ain't my business, so I don't ask."

"Didn't mean to ask you to pry," Keanu said. "Zoe wants me to talk to him, but-"

"But you don't wanna pry." Nick's hoarse laugh echoed out of the darkness in a way that reminded Keanu uncomfortably of the ghosts that inhabited their old home. _Thunk, tap, thunk, thunk._

"Yeah." Washing his hands over his face, Keanu groaned. "I don't like the idea the idea of her thinking she has any power over us, even if it isn't true. I'm not sure if it would be true power or false, at this point. She could refuse to maintain the barriers if we disobey her."

Nick grunted. "True 'nuff. Didn't think'a that."_ Scrape, thunk, thunk, tap._ "Guess that's what makes you th'leader."

A shriek of wind rattled the door. Keanu stared at it a moment, until the movement stopped. He looked back to Nick. On the other side of the window, a little girl stood tapping her finger against the window. She met his eyes. "Nick."

Dark dots began to appear on the girl's neck. As his companion scrambled away from the window, Keanu watched her throat slit open. She grinned at him, her mouth a gaping blackness, and then ran off into the storm. Her giggles echoed over the noise of the raging storm.

Keanu climbed off the stool and sat down next to Nick, where the boy had pressed his back to the far wall of the shop. Shoulder to shoulder, back to solid wall, they stared at the door and window equally. Once again the door began to rattle.

The handle twisted and the door slammed open. Rain poured in, saturating the old floorboards and blowing into their faces. His skin crawled, _burned _like fire ants writhing inside of him, through his organs, his blood, and into his brain. Falling on top of one another, the boys crawled as far from the door and the water as they could get, but the puddle inched along the floor after them.

A skeletal hand slapped the threshold, then another after it. Too busy trying to brush the invisible ants from his hair and skin, and having no success, Keanu barely noticed the corpse pulling itself inch by inch across the floor. Its fingers latched around his ankle.

"You promised!"

_click-clack-swoosh click-clack-swoosh_

Someone was humming a faint, familiar tune, beneath the steady counterpoint of the spinning wheel. A chair creaked in time, and somewhere nearby a fire crackled.

_click-clack-swoosh click-clack-swoosh_

The world was a blur of darkness and flickering firelight. With his eyes cracked open, Kunzite could just make out the shape of a woman sitting next to the hearth. Her long, silver hair blazed an orange pool about her figure, and when she looked up the horn protruding from her head glittered gold. The humming ceased.

_click-clack-swoosh click-clack-swoosh_

"Good evening, my prince."

"Mom?"

Alcyone took her foot from the pedal and allowed the spinning wheel to slow to it's stop. She looped her place about the needle, then stood and went to the bedside. The mattress gave slightly beneath her weight. Placing a hand upon his brow, the princess hummed. "No fever. That's good. But Kunzite, you must be more careful than this. Taking so much at once...it is not wise."

He groaned faintly and shut his eyes.

"I know you didn't mean to," said Alcyone from the darkness, "Everyone makes mistakes. All there is to do is learn from them."

Fingers combed through his hair.

"Do you remember, my Kunzite? Do you remember where I died?"

There was a little shrine in the slums, he could see it in his mind's eye. It was half fallen in and deserted. Over the lintel was a crescent moon written in his mother's blood.

A light scorched the backs of his eyelids, annoying and insistent that he wake. As insistent as the shaking of his body and the nonsense words shouted near his ear. Keanu groaned again, forced his aching eyes to blink, then promptly flopped his arm over them.

"You asshole," muttered Zoe, and the hands left his shoulder, leaving him free to roll onto his back.

Someone moaned to his left. "Waa'th'fuk?"

"Dunno," Keanu managed, and winced. His throat scraped around the words, and his lips felt like they were cracking. A tangy, metallic taste in his mouth said they probably already had. If that weren't enough, every inch of him, every tiny molecule, seemed to be having a screaming fit.

"You were missing all night," Jun said from somewhere in the darkness.

"We've been worried sick." He could imagine the glares Zoe was giving him and the way she gesticulated as she yelled, all punctuated by a drum beat of stomping sneakers. "You didn't come back, and then the storm went screwy. There was all this lightning and banshee howling, and someone kept screaming something about promises. We even heard it at the shrine.

"And then we couldn't find you. Anywhere. We searched the whole god damn village."

"If y'don't stop yer screamin', you're gonna wish ya hadn't found us."

"Bring it on, buster, I can take your-"

"Guys." Keanu sat up, waving one hand in their general directions. It was a mistake to uncover his eyes, and he winced away from the open window. "Gah."

Immediately it was dark.

He could still feel the presence of the others, and that was all that kept Keanu from panicking. After a long pause, Zoe squeaked, "What did we do?"

"Didn't do anything," said Jun. There was a scuffle of shoes from where Keanu thought the window was. They traveled toward the door, and the knob rattled. A flash of the night before sent daggers of fear down Keanu's spine, but before he could call out to stop Jun, the door opened. There was...whiteness on the outside. Light, against which Jun's form was a silhouette. Somehow the light didn't spill into the room; it was as though someone had just cut a line in the air through which no light could cross. Like being on the privileged side of a two-way mirror.

"Maybe I'm dreaming," Zoe muttered.

Keanu shook his head. As soon as he did, the world snapped back into normalcy and something deep inside of him began to scream all the more loudly. He collapsed forward onto his bent knees and held himself.

Nick sat up; he'd been laying directly beside Keanu, but seemed a little better off, at least in the coping department. Watching their leader through slit eyes, Nick scratched his dark, locked up mane. "Over reaction, much?" His voice was as hoarse as Keanu's, but he followed the question with a dry, rattly laugh. "Ain't ya ever had a hangover?"

"I don't drink."

That got another short bark of laughter from Nick. The boy pulled himself to his feet and offered Keanu a hand. "Yer almost eighteen."

Eventually, Keanu took the help and tried not to wince as his joints protested with cracks and pops. "Even if that were legal, I still wouldn't. Intoxicant."

"Yeah, s'what it's for."

Keanu rolled his eyes. "You're a comedic genius, I'm sure." Arms around one another, the pair limped slowly for the door. Zoe frowned at them, but neither she nor Jun said anything, even when they stopped at the door to adjust to the light as best they could. Little by little, the quartet made their way through the muddy streets of Elysion as Nick and Keanu pieced together the events of the previous night.

The only comfortable position he could find was on his stomach, face in pillow. That worked so long as he could hold his breath, then he'd have to turn his neck and gulp like a goldfish. Still, Keanu tried, and was for once thankful of the inky blackness in the temple bedchambers. Blackness that was natural, unlike the void he'd created that morning.

Even now, hours after the fact, that little, indefinable part of him still blazed within him, swollen and feverish. Keanu knew that even if he wanted to light his little chamber he wouldn't be able to without a candle. Normal methods. Great.

As weird and annoying as the glowworm effect had been, it was a little strange to not be able to use it.

Someone knocked at the door and he groaned. It swung open, and shut again. When Keanu turned his head to breath, he found Pythia standing in the flickering light of an unshielded candle mounted on a tray with what smelled like lunch, or maybe dinner; Keanu wasn't certain how long he'd been laying down. She set the offering on the floor beside the mattress, then sat on her knees beside it. "I thought I would see how you were faring."

"Like roadkill, I imagine."

Though her brows furrowed, the maiden offered a small smile. "That is to be expected, I suppose. Prince Nicholas isn't doing much better."

Neither of the shrine maidens would call them by their first names alone, though they'd tried often enough to get them to. That the title used was 'Prince' and not 'King' had not escaped Keanu's notice, but he'd never cared to question it. He still didn't.

It was awkward to continue laying down while another watched him, so he forced himself to sit up. His head stopped spinning after a moment, and he glanced at the food she'd brought him. Somehow he was managing to be both nauseous and hungry. "Thanks."

"My pleasure."

They stared at one another. Keanu looked back to the tray, then sighed. He slid off the mattress and onto the floor before picking up bowl of hot, thick soup she'd brought him. Instead of using the spoon, he brought it to his mouth and took a testing sip. It wasn't so hot that it burned, and it seemed to steady him a little. Pythia smiled.

Keanu stared into his bowl, watching the potatoes bob around other vegetables and chunks of meat. "These storms...I thought you said they meant Elysion would heal? But they're..."

"Destructive?"

He nodded.

"Yes." A sad smile flickered upon Pythia's lips. "Nature is like that sometimes. Wild, unpredictable, counter intuitive. Like a forest fire. It cleanses the earth and allows things to start anew."

"Great." That was an analogy he didn't want mentioned to Jun. After another sip, as she seemed to expect it, he continued, "There was something weird, though. I've walked in rainstorms before, even rainstorms here. This one...When the water touched me, it felt like I was going to burst. Be consumed from the inside out."

Pythia was still. He watched her as she watched her hands in her lap. "I think," she said slowly, "You want me to tell you what this was." When he nodded, she shook her head. "I am sorry. If I could, I would, but it is not in any of the information to which I was privy."

"You think it has something to do with being a Shitennou?" She nodded and Keanu sighed. That was great. "Thank you, Pythia."

The maiden rose and gave a bow. "If you leave the tray outside the door, I will make certain it is taken care of."

Keanu thanked her again, and watched her leave. When he was alone, he set the unfinished bowl back upon its tray and climbed back into bed. He watched the candle burn itself to a nub long after he'd gone to sleep.


	2. Thistle and Weeds

**NICHOLAS**  
><em>Thistle and Weeds<em>

The shops this close to the castle were lovely little places with glass windows, and even floors, and doors that locked properly, and streets that were regularly patrolled to ensure that robberies were few and far between. That the same could not be said for all of Elysion was something which had only recently occurred to Nephrite; it dampened the otherwise brilliant and beautiful summer day. Aware that he was clinging, somewhat desperately, to his enthusiasm, Nephrite let himself into the little jeweler's shop just across from from the apothecary's and greeted the old artisan with as wide a grin as he could manage.

"Be with you in a minute." Porthos was sitting, as always, at the work bench that ran the back of the shop, back to the door. In any other neighborhood Nephrite might have been a thief, and Porthos still wouldn't have looked up from whatever he was working on.

The man was a sack of pallid, grooved skin and bones; despite the monthly stipend sent to him by the Western House, Porthos never seemed to gain much in the way of weight. Nephrite only kept his tongue as the man didn't seem to be suffering, either, but he had begun a tradition of sending a hot meal over from one of the better taverns once a week, just to be sure. The remains of last night's were still sitting on the far end of the bench, indicating that Porthos' still hadn't replaced the apprentice whose talent for finding lost objects had gotten him drafted into temple a fortnight prior. Nephrite sighed.

He picked the mess up himself and walked through the back door, into the ill used kitchen, and out into the tiny back garden where the wash was. Princes weren't commonly asked to clean dishes, but Nephrite thought he did a decent enough job at it. When he was done, he re-stacked everything and brought it back inside.

"I'll send the Jewel's boy after these later this evening," he said, and Porthos hummed. Probably hadn't heard a word.

On the far wall, where the sunlight could fall upon them, trinkets hung from pegs on the wall and were displayed on low shelves. There were a rather lot of them—more than in any other jeweler's shop that Nephrite had seen—as Porthos was one of the lucky artisans; he had a generous patron who allowed him to work on whatever he pleased. True, a few of the displayed were commissioned pieces—each of these had a little slip of paper attached to it by a string, with the name of the owner written in Porthos' careful print—but the majority were not. Porthos would sell them piece by piece to whomever wandered into the shop that didn't know what they wanted, exactly. And, of course, his patron was in his rights to ask for whatever might catch his eye.

Nephrite had taken advantage of this more than a few times. Though he had something of an artistic eye himself, or so he thought, it was nothing compared to Porthos' genius. The only pieces he'd commissioned from his own designs, thus far, had been solstice gifts for his mother and sisters every winter. And the piece he'd sketched a few weeks ago.

Now he wondered if it was such a good idea. Pursing his lips and wetting them, Nephrite glanced back out the window to the sunlit streets beyond. At midday there were few people out, most would be stuffing down dinner in one of the taverns or their homes, but a few passed here and there along the street: a donkey and covered cart, a woman with a jar of water on her back, children chasing one another through the shops. The door to the apothecary's opened and a woman stepped out.

For a moment Nephrite's breath caught; dark brown tresses, sun kissed skin, the right height, the right shape...she turned, and he saw that she wasn't Girasol but some merchant's girl, judging from the quality of her clothes. He sighed inwardly. Elysion was not the largest of the Earth's cities, but neither was it the smallest. That he hadn't once run into Girasol out of the forest was beginning to weigh on his mind.

There was a creak as Porthos sat upright. "Didn't expect to see ye two days in a row. This must be pretty important."

Nephrite turned from the window as Porthos rose from the stool and slid it back beneath the bench. "It's been five days, Porthos," he said, gently, and the man's bushy, iron-grey eyebrows knotted together.

"Y'don't say," the man gruffed. He'd stopped arguing about time with Nephrite several years ago. The prince still hadn't decided if that were a good thing. Stepping forward, he took a look at the bronze work laid out on the table.

He'd designed the necklace to resemble a torc, save that it was made in multiple parts which would be strung together on a chain. The body of it was vaguely crescent shaped, and the splits in the metal pieces disguised by a raised, interlocking network of vines. Intermixed into it all were engraved pictures of animals: a doe, a hare, a lion, and a unicorn.

A cloud must have passed over the sun, for the light began to fade. Nephrite frowned as he stared down at the bit of jewelry. Had that vine just unfurled itself?

It was impossible of course. Bronze was a "soft" metal but not that...

The doe was staring at him. She'd been drinking water from a spring, and now she stared up at him. A faint yowl shook the throat of the lion, and the unicorn's horn flashed. Step by step he backed away from the bench. Porthos remained beside it, head bent and still. Very still. Impossibly still.

His head jerked around a full 180. Demon eyes glared at the boy from a rotten and mangled face. "Traitor," it shrieked, and its howl was taken up by a thousand voices that swarmed through his head and threaten to split it. "Traitor! Traitor!"

"No I ain't!"

His back pressed to the glass, freezing him even through his clothes. The creature his friend had become took a backward step toward him. Nephrite edged toward the door, and the corpse shuffled closer. With a sickening, ripping sound, the body began to turn itself to match it's head's direction.

When his groping hand found the handle, Nephrite twisted it and bolted out the door.

He was laying on the floor on his stomach, and he was freezing. At some point his entire body had become a mass of aching, bruised muscle, and his head didn't seem to be faring much better. Other conditions, such as the brilliant sunlight beating against his face, and someone yelling in the distance, registered more slowly.

The door banged opened. Nicholas grumbled and hid his face in the crux of one elbow. Two sets of footsteps rushed across the floor. One stopped a few feet away, and the other went to his side. "Ken? Ken! Come on, wake up."

Someone who wasn't Nick—Keanu, he guessed, with what little of his mind was currently working—groaned in response. "You bastard," spat Zoe, and her presence retreated back across the room.

Nick mumbled something at her as well, then concentrated on pulling himself back to his feet. She was ranting, and he didn't give a shit. His vision swam with every movement, no matter how tiny. It had nothing to do with his headache.

Rather, his eyes seemed confused as to what they were looking at. The little jewelry shop seemed torn between a state of lived-in clutter and lost, forgotten junk. Nick knew that the latter was probably more accurate, but knowledge didn't seem to help anything. He rubbed his sinuses.

When his gaze focused, it landed on a back corner shelf where a piece still had a name tag, waiting for pick up. It was an ornate necklace, resembling a multi-pieced torch.

"And then we couldn't find you. Anywhere. We searched the whole god damn village."

A little gust of breeze flipped the little tag around. "If y'don't stop yer screamin', you're gonna wish ya hadn't found us."

"Bring it on, buster, I can take you—"

"Guys," Keanu interjected, and then cut himself off with a groan. They plunged into pitch blackness, and Nick slumped in relief. That the effect was magically induced was immediately obvious-even if there were technology which could block sunlight without the use of solid walls it wouldn't be found in Elysion. The now-familiar itch of magic against his skin was as good a clue. The others didn't quite seem to get it, though, and he spared a moment to wonder, unfairly, if they were just slow.

Or maybe he had spent more time thinking about it.

The effect died as quickly as it had come. Nick got himself under one of Keanu's arms, and they helped each other back to the temple.

There wasn't such a thing as a hot bath here, but that was okay. For someone unused to being clean on a regular basis, a cold scrub down with a rag was a luxury. Once he was moderately clean again, Nephrite barricaded himself into his cell and tried to sleep.

He'd always been drawn to the stars, to the sky. Standing at the edge of parapet, he closed his eyes and raised his face to the heavens. A stiff wind blew from the west, and he imagined it carried upon it a soft song of home, of wind in the willow trees and crickets in the bayous, and his grandmother humming softly to the creak of her rocking chair. Life in the West was exceedingly different from life in Elysion.

That had been the strangest adjustment when he'd been called to take his place in court. His first years of life had been spent just shy of wild, running through the swamps with his fellows, untitled and ignorant of most court manners. Such was the lot of a prince of a dry house.

If he concentrated hard enough, Nephrite could recall his father pacing round the huge fire-pit in the main hall of Zephyros castle the night that his grandfather passed. King Danburite's death had not been quick nor unexpected—yet it had left their family in a lurch.

Malachite was not gifted. Though a lord in his own right, a blooded knight, and regent of the west since the shaking disease had spread through Danburite's bones, Malachite could not inherit the throne in any official capacity. Neither could Chrysocolla, for much the same reason. Although Chrysocolla's children had all been gifted mightily, their blood was tainted by an eastern father. That left only one of Danburite's children capable of donning the crown of the western house.

At six years old, Nephrite hadn't really understood the problem. All he knew was that his father was very angry, and sad, and that he'd spent an awful lot of time yelling at Aunt Beryl.

The woman in question was standing to one side of the fire, chin lofted and eyes glittering in the firelight. Unlike her sister, she had not wept for their father. Nephrite decided, somewhere in the back of his mind, that this was because she feared her brother seeing such emotion. It was an uncomfortable thought.

"Have I not done my duty by this house, Malachite?" Her voice, though soft, seemed to resonate through the chamber. Malachite, still pacing, glowered at her from across the pit. "That this is unusual is certain, but it is not so unusual as to be unheard of. Besides this, I am your sister, am I not? What is it that you would accuse your own family of?"

Lord Malachite sneered at that, and slowed to a halt near to his youngest son. Nephrite looked up at his father, who stared through him. A chill trickled down his spine. Normally Malachite was so kind, so friendly.

"You are my sister," Malachite affirmed with a faint sigh. "And in that I do love you, and trust you. But Beryl...you must realize how this will seem to the rest of the world. There are whispers, even now, that our house is run dry of the gift."

"Droughts are as much a part of nature as monsoons, brother," Beryl said. One fire-red eyebrow quirked as she fixed Malachite in her gaze. "There is no other, we acknowledge this. Unless you would be willing to claim an acolyte."

In retrospect, Nephrite knew why his father's cheeks coloured and his mother hid her face away. He might have hated Beryl for bringing that up so publicly, but by the time he knew what she meant he also knew that most of the other lords would colour the same.

As though to add to her point, a boy near to Nephrite's age rushed into the hall. He was robed in the simple white and brown of the temple acolytes, dark haired and green eyed. The sleeve of his tunic, where most of the priesthood would have embroidered their house seal, was blank; he was a bastard. Even then, Nephrite thought that this boy looked uncomfortably like himself, and by extension, his father. Beryl took a look at the sealed package of papers he carried, then sent him scuttling over to Malachite.

The Lord's shoulders sagged as he accepted the letters. When he'd nodded, and Beryl had as well, the boy ran again from the room. Malachite broke the seal and scanned the contents. His shoulders sagged, and he carded one hand through his peppered auburn hair. He met Beryl's gaze once more and inclined his head. "My queen," he growled.

Beryl's chin lowered a degree, but only that. "I did try to tell you," she said so softly that Nephrite nearly missed it. He glanced between them as his father shook his head. The new queen stepped forward, and reached for one of Malachite's hands. Neither seemed to mind the six-year-old at their feet. "Father only named me last week. We were still hoping he would recover."

Malachite's eyes closed, and Beryl took his other hand to squeeze them both. They did not care that the king's letter crumpled between them. "I do know how this looks," Beryl assured him in the same low voice. "I, too, have heard the whispers. That I crave power. That I seek to dismantle the houses and rule alone. Some even claim me to be a demoness, sent by the Moon Queen herself."

Lord Malachite gave a raspy chuckle at that, and Beryl a faint smile. He opened his eyes to hers. "You know as well as I how dangerous such 'whispers' can be."

Reluctantly, the woman nodded. "Yes. And it is with that in mind, as well our family's good health, that I make a promise to you..."

She paused to catch the eyes of their family gathered about the hearth, notably the ranking nobles among them. Her voice lifted so that all might hear. "I, Queen Beryl of the Western Kingdom, hereby charge you with regency of the West as I take my place in Elysion. I swear also an oath here, in this sacred hall, before the witness of all our family, that the first of your children to show themselves capable shall be named my heir, and will take my place upon the throne as soon as they are of age."

"I am honoured, my queen." Malachite bowed over their joined hands. It was only Nephrite who heard him ask, "but what of your own...?"

"Should I have any," the queen whispered in kind, "my oath will remain firm."

She looked down then, and met Nephrite's eyes. Though at that time he could not have said why, Nephrite knew as well she that there would never be such an issue. He blinked, and her face was an inch from his.

Nicholas recoiled and banged his back against the far wall. "Gah!"

Bachiko remained still as a statue, staring at him as he shook his aching body, and scrubbed at his eyes. He sat up and she did in kind, still staring at him. He finished scrubbing at his eyes, then grunted. "Wha'd'ya want?"

She jumped up, kissed his forehead, and ran from the room. Giggling.

After a moment, Nick sighed and shook his head. "Loon," he muttered. She'd brought a candle with her, at least, and left it sitting on the floor in a little brass holder. He rolled his stiff shoulders, then picked it up.

The door had been locked when he'd gone to sleep, but the latch was undone now. He shook his head, and reminded himself that this had been her home once; she'd know the ways in and out of everything.

Pausing at the threshold, Nick briefly considered simply relocking the door and going back to sleep. It was tempting, and his body ached to do it, but with the dream so fresh in mind he knew he'd be hard pressed for any real rest. And, he had to admit, he was a little worried he'd just drift back into it.

He swung the door closed behind him and went for entrance stair. A whisper at the back of his mind told him that it wouldn't be raining. Trusting it, he lifted the door open and came out into the chilled night air atop the shrine.

Everything on the surface glowed faintly with a golden light, cast from the enormous crystal at the middle of the platform. When he'd resettled the door, Nicholas put the candle beside it and drifted toward the crystal. It seemed to give off a faint warmth, as well. On a whim, Nicholas extended both hands until his palms hovered just over the surface of the crystal.

The same, familiar itch began to make it's way up his arms. He closed his eyes and held his hands as still as he could. Odd as the feeling was, he was beginning to get used to it.

"Pay attention!" A reed smacked across his hands hard enough that he yelped and stuck his fingers to his mouth. Hiddenite growled at the five of them, and shook his head. A stiff breeze ruffled the man's sun bleached hair, and he brushed the bangs from his eyes once again. Clearing his throat, the teacher resumed his pacing as he lectured. "The truth of the matter is, my lads, that most people have magic in their veins."

Nephrite stared at the apple in his lap. After much cajoling, Hiddenite had moved their lessons out to the orchard that morning. It was not often the boys were given such a treat, especially when it came to Hiddenite's teachings. Indeed, when it came to his and Jadeite's private instruction this sort of thing never happened.

"If everyone is capable, then why is everyone not a priest?" Endymion laughed and shared an all-knowing look with Kunzite. "Why do the houses rule?"

"That is a question, isn't it," said Hiddenite, cutting their laughter short. When the silence had stretched to a breaking point, he shook his head. "I said that we all have magic in our veins, not that it is always of use. Indeed, a blacksmith may be able forge a horseshoe that never gets thrown, or a farmer's fields are never overrun by crows, or a seamstress sews a stitch that will not unravel. They do not do these things by purpose or planning, but because an otherwise unrealized gift allows them to."

"But not all people..." Jadeite trailed off, and Hiddenite fixed him with a faint smirk.

"Not all people can do these things? True. But a beggar's daughter may, or a butcher's son. Enough of the priesthood comes from the common folk that it begs the question of just how much magical blood runs outside of the noble houses."

Nephrite snorted. "Everyone knows they're bastards."

The others glanced at him, and Nephrite pretended not to notice. Hiddenite's brows raised. "Do they. So then, you believe that your father and uncles are out throwing so many bastards? They must be idle quite a good deal."

Cheeks heating, Nephrite frowned. "I didn't—"

"Say it in so many words, no, but if all the common folk in the priesthood are bastards of noble families, well then, we noble men must be honourless indeed."

"He only said what we were all thinking," Zoicite said. "I mean, that's...that's what I was always told, too."

"And I," Endymion said. The prince leaned back on one hand, and though his posture was relaxed his friends could easily read the darkness in his eyes. "Or are you calling _my _father a liar, Hiddenite?"

Hiddenite met the prince's gaze evenly. "Your father and I disagree on many points, sire," he said after a moment, "As I have heard your companions disagree with you. I would never insinuate that your father has lied, not intentionally, but there are many things that we accept for face value in this world which make little sense when examined closely.

"It is my job to ensure that you boys are willing to examine that which others would have you believe," he continued, "and need I remind you that your companions will one day be your advisers in their own right? Would you have them agree with everything you said, no matter the subject, or offer you view points that are not your own?"

Endymion's mouth moved several times in an attempt to defend himself. Jadeite threw an arm around the crown prince's shoulders. "Ah, we all know Endy is just perfect on his own. We're only here to ride on his coattails."

They laughed, but Hiddenite did not seem amused.

Nicholas shook his head as the vision faded. His fingers were vibrating with the energy radiating from the crystal. The "itch" of magic had become a faint burn, like hot water that coursed through his finger tips and into his veins. Though nothing changed outwardly, it seemed to Nicholas that every nook and cranny of his soul—every rip and gash and crevice he had never known existed—was being pumped full of crystal's energy, filling him out like a water balloon. When it seemed he might burst, he drew his hands away and looked at the pink flesh of his palms.

Dizzy, he reeled away from the crystal, backing several steps from it and sinking to his knees. He put a hand to his head, pressing it against his sinus until the world seemed steady again.

"We were so complacent."

The girl came around the far side of the crystal, one hand extended to it. She didn't touch, not quite, but her fingers came within a hair of it's surface. In the crystal's golden light, Bachiko's hair looked ever more like flame billowing around her head. Dodona had lent her some robes; the soft white of the shrine maiden's gown looked right on her, Nicholas thought.

Her gaze tore slowly away from the night beyond the shrine, and fell upon him. "So much that we never told you." The girl—woman—sighed to herself and glanced to the crystal. "So much indeed that we never really understood ourselves."

"Beryl?" Her chin tilted in his direction, but she did not look. Nicholas frowned. "Aunt Beryl?"

A smile. "Mm. I know you're not him, my Nephrite...not exactly. But I miss him, and you are as close as you should safely get."

Slowly, Nicholas stood. "How d'ya mean?"

Her laughter sent shivers through him. He squared his jaw and strode back to the crystal, to her side. She grinned up at him. "I can't stay this way forever."

Nicholas nodded. Swallowing the lesser questions, he asked, "What were ya complacent about?"

"As I said, there is much no one bothered to explain. Things which you should have known from the start. Such things that we thought were too...obvious. I see, now, that they are not. The most obvious thing to a master is often the least so to an apprentice."

She turned, quick as a fox, and grabbed his hands. Lifting them, Beryl showed him his palms. They smarted beneath her fingers; Nicholas refused to wince. "You have almost taken too much, you see? Too much into yourself."

"I don't—energy. Y'mean energy?"

Beryl gave a single nod. "This is your personal store," she said, leaning in. "You must never let it go entirely. The last of your energy is the last of you."

Her touch was...pulsing. Like feeling her heart beat, the warmth of her hands around his seemed to thump against his skin, in time with his own. Nicholas met her eyes. "The storm..."

"The earth both gives and takes," she said softly. Overhead the storm grumbled. "Do not let yourself be caught again. Not in these. They are not natural; not any longer."

A great creak from the door of the shrine caught both their attention. Zoe blinked owlishly at them from the stair. "The hell are you two doing?"

Abruptly, the flow between their hands cut. Bachiko giggled and stumbled into him, so that he had to catch her. Nicholas looked back at Zoe, then at the girl in his arms. Sighing, he put Bachiko upright, then gave her a nudge toward the stair. "Get back t'bed."

To his surprise, Bachiko obeyed. She teetered past Zoe and down into the darkness beneath. Zoe stayed at the entrance, looking down after the other girl. Frowning, she glanced at Nick and arched a single brow. He shrugged, and waited until Zoe went back inside and shut the hatch behind her.

The clouds above were threatening once again. Despite Beryl's warning, Nicholas stood beside the crystal for awhile longer. Every so often a single star would peek out from the sky.

After a blissfully dreamless sleep that lasted well into the afternoon, Nicholas grabbed an apple from Dodona's kitchen and skipped up the steps to the shrine proper. He cast a weather eye to the clouded sky, and sighed. At the steps he paused to bite into his apple and survey the world beyond. Everything was well soaked and slippery looking, even the ground.

Finding a clear place in the thorny vines that covered the pillars next to the stair, Nicholas set his shoulder against it and watched the tall grass sway in the breeze. There were more thunderheads mounting over the city.

Rather than risk a second round of exposure, he finished his apple, tossed the core, and went back inside.

Just weeks ago Nicholas would have given anything to have a warm place to sleep, a roof over his head, a guarantee of food every day...the mere idea of complaining about any of these things, even in thought, felt to him like a stab in the gut. Still, the back of his mind whispered that he'd give anything to be free of this place.

Unlike the other companions, Nephrite had never lived at any temple, much less this one. Beryl had made good her promise the instant they had realized his powers. At nine he'd been taken from the West and brought to Castle Valeia to finish his education with the other princes of the realm. Nephrite had been the last to arrive, though he wasn't the youngest of them, and he'd always felt a little different for it. That wasn't the fault of his companions, who had never seemed to share the disorientation, and who had, in mere weeks, become like brothers to him.

Nicholas closed the hatch, and descended the steps in darkness. Someone had left a candle burning at the landing; it let off just enough light for him to see the way back to his room. Other candelabra were spaced just closely enough along the hall that the shadowed areas were minimal throughout the common halls.

If he wanted to explore further in he'd have to be a glowworm like Keanu, or bring a candle with him. Or...

Pausing at the end of a long corridor, just at the edge of the darkness, Nicholas looked down at his hands. He closed his eyes and took in a deep, slow breath. After exhaling in kind, he took another. The crackle of the candelabra was the first to dampen, then the chill of the stone beneath his feet, then his awareness of his own body. It was as though he was sinking deep into darkness, deep into himself.

There was a river flowing inside of him.

Like a blood stream, he supposed, but not blood. Not his blood. Though it pulsed in time with his heartbeat, Nicholas had the distinct feeling that this river had a will of its own. Swallowing his fear, he plunged in.

"Aotea," she sing-songed above him.

Nephrite grumbled and rubbed the sleep from his eyes, blinking at the brilliant light of the noonday sun above him. Girasol's face blocked it a moment later, and she grinned. "So lazy! What must the deer think of you?"

"They're getting used to my presence." He yawned and sat up. "I thought you were going to be out this morning?"

The girl shook her head, backing away several steps as she did. She shrugged and flipped some of her long, dark hair over one shoulder. "Plans changed, sorry. Father needed me."

"Winter's coming on strong this year," he said, and she nodded after a glance to the sky. In the forest around them, the leaves had begun to turn and the day was only hot if you were in the sun. Wildflowers were still blooming in their meadow, though, close to the stream. On the other side of the water was a fawn half-hidden behind a log—its mother was probably too scared of the hunters to return for it so long as they were there. Nephrite chuckled softly, and followed when Girasol went for their favorite game trail.

"How is he faring?"

Girasol startled, then smiled faintly. "Better, I think. The healer says he should be right as rain soon enough."

"Good to hear." Nephrite offered her a smile, and hoped it would quash the sudden surge of panic within him. Were the man to overcome his sickness there'd be little need for his daughter to feed her family in his stead. Girasol would return to her proper place, and Nephrite would have to either reveal himself or put an end to this...friendship.

Then she tapped his shoulder and gestured to a line of fresh tracks just to the side of their trail. He nodded; there was no place for conversation during a hunt.

By late afternoon they'd collected four rabbits between them and returned to their clearing to clean them. The fawn was gone, now, and Nephrite was glad. It would mean another season of good hunting.

Unlike most women he'd known in Elysion, Girasol showed no squeamishness as she sliced open the first of the rabbit carcasses to remove its bowels. Her nose wrinkled, stretching the smatter of freckles across it, for this was smelly work; yet she hummed. Nephrite cast aside the entrails of a large brown buck. "What's that?"

"Hm?"

"That song."

There was a pause, and Nephrite looked up to find her staring quite intently at her handful of gore. He lifted a brow.

Girasol shook her head, tawny hair flopping over one shoulder. "Can't remember the name. Just, um, something my mother used to sing."

"It's pretty," he said lightly and smiled when she looked at him. The girl relaxed a little, but something dark swirled in those bright green eyes when he looked into them. Not for the first time the urge to peek into her thoughts arose, but Nephrite brushed it aside as quickly as it'd come. That would be more than merely invasive, and he felt guilty at even the thought. "Do you sing?"

She laughed. "Not often. I'm not very good at it. I've a cousin, though, who can charm birds from the sky."

Tossing aside the third set of entrails, nephrite stood and watched her finish with the fourth. He took out a rag and wiped his blade clean before sheathing it. "You've family in the clergy?"

"What?" Girasol blinked at him, then laughed. "I didn't mean literally."

"Ah." He picked up the two rabbits he'd cleaned and put them over one shoulder. Some blood was sure to drip down his back, to match the stains set in from previous excursions, but he didn't mind. The huntress carried her lot in much the same fashion, and they began the slow walk toward the village outskirts.

"Does she live around here? Your cousin."

"Uh...no," Girasol said with a shake of her head. "They're off to the, ah, east I believe. I don't get to see her too often."

Before he could ask where in the 'east,' she continued, "Why? You like girls that can sing?"

He chuckled. "I'm just curious is all. You don't talk about your family much."

"No more than you."

"Damn." Nephrite nudged her shoulder and gave her a wink. "You've got me there."

They were coming up on the fields faster than he liked. This late in the year the wheat was tall, and it wasn't likely that any farm hands out in it would be able to see him together. Still, were anyone to recognize him...Nephrite squashed the thought. Should it matter that a noble were spending time with an unmarried young lady? It wouldn't for him, and he knew it, but for her...

He paused at the edge of the forest, and Girasol did as well. There was also the matter that he'd never told her, which clawed momentarily at the pit of his stomach. It wasn't a lie, precisely, what he had said. Nephrite was, after all, the son of a man with the right to hunt in the King's forest. Said man was simply not a game warden, as she'd assumed. Would the truth have scared her? He'd thought so, then, but looking now at the fierce huntresses beside him it was hard to tell. She was made of much sterner material than he'd thought women could be.

In a way, she reminded him of his Aunt Beryl.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" Girasol laughed.

"What if I..." Nephrite chuckled softly at himself, before he once again met her eyes. He wet his lips and saw her glance at them. For a fleeting moment his breath hitched, and he leaned toward her. She took a step backward.

"I better go," she said. Two steps more, she turned and continued alone down the path toward the distant mountains. Nephrite watched until she rounded the distant fields, and was swallowed by the golden wheat. He turned, finally, and headed for the castle.

The light of day had been replaced with an unnatural green light emanating from his hands, and he'd been relieved of the weight of rabbit on his shoulder or the familiar pressure of bowstring across his chest. Nicholas held his hands out before him, staring. They were surrounded by a green fire, flickering and heatless around his skin. The light expanded to the edge of the forest path around him. He frowned.

To his left were the fields—barren and trampled, and scattered with the lumped forms of decomposing beasts of burden. They'd drug the human corpses from it, at least.

On his right was the forest, quiet but for a whisper of wind unintelligibly caressing his ear. There was no moon to light the night around him, but in his mind's eye Nephrite could see the castle parapets just visible over the trees to the north, and if he turned he'd be able to see the light of the shrine flickering on the distant hillside.

No longer did he bother to question how he'd gotten so far from the temple. Sky trembling above, Nicholas looked down the path into the woods. There was a...a presence within them. He knew it as surely as he felt the hairs lifting along his arms and the back of his neck. In the gas-green light burning from his hands, the trees seemed ghoulish and unnatural, and beyond laid only blackness.

Turning from it, he followed the muddy path until it became cobbled and lined in fancy houses. Faces stared out at him from doorways and windows, and hidden in the darker corners of the village. By the time he found the jeweler's shop his back was a nest of knots, yet he did not turn, he did not run. He could not.

They'd left the door open, and it swung lightly on its hinges as he approached. Nicholas edged around it, daring not to touch the wood, and winced when it slammed shut behind him. There was no lock on that door, and there never had been. He was grateful of that now.

Large spots of dark liquid shimmered on the wooden floor, fresh and wet save for the clotting edges. No bodies, but the door to the kitchen was ajar and a pool leaked from beneath it.

"I'm sorry."

Not a whisper sounded, nor a breath of air stirred. Unsure of what he expected, exactly, Nicholas glanced around the dark workshop, then focused in on the kitchen door. "I _am _sorry," he repeated, "It ain't worth much, I know. But I am. Dinnit mean for this t'happen. Never thought..."

He swallowed thickly and scrubbed a hand through his hair. The fire did not diminish, nor burn him, and he stared at his hand after. "I ain't him, y'know? Nephrite. There's something in me you recognize, maybe, but it ain't...ain't the same."

Was that the truth, though? Nicholas frowned at himself. The kitchen door squeaked. He backed a step away from it. Once again the hair on the back of his neck began to rise. "Guess that don't matter, does it?" Immediately, the door stopped moving.

Reaching backward until he found the selves, Nicholas leaned against them and pressed his back to the wood. "Ain't your fault you got left here. Any-a you. Ain't fair, really."

Whatever it was, was breathing, a raspy and shallow beat in the otherwise still air. Nicholas shuddered. A foot stepped out from behind the door, then another. The ghoul was wearing a floral print dress and Beverly's face, but he knew better now. This was not Beverly.

Slowly, the creature reached its corpse hands out to point at the back corner shelf. Nicholas eased over until he could paw blindly behind him for the torc. It was freezing beneath his fingertips, but he grabbed it up and clutched it to his chest. "I'll get rid of it. Won't bother you anymore."

He eased around the shop's perimeter to the door; the demon watched. It did not move, not even when he closed the door behind himself, and ran back down the street.

There were prints in his palms from where the metal had bitten into his skin. Nicholas examined them as he leaned, panting, against a column at the shrine. It stung a little. Carefully untangling the chain, Nicholas fit the puzzle-pieces of the torc back together and laid it flat against his unmarked palm. The 'fire' that surrounded his hands engulfed it, letting him see perfectly the detail of the animals carved into the bronze. A doe dipped her head to drink from a spring, as did a unicorn on the other side. In the middle was a lion, gazing magnanimously outward. None of them moved, no vines flowered before his eyes.

He closed his eyes and exhaled a breath he hadn't meant to hold.

Slow steps sounded above him, and he looked up the stairs just as Jun came into view. The boy's eyes fell upon the torc in Nicholas' hand, and a pale eyebrow quirked upward.

"It was mine," Nicholas said.

Jun grunted and stuffed his hands in his pants pockets as he drifted down the stair. "How'd you do that?" The boy's curly head bobbed a nod toward Nicholas' hands.

"Pretty basic." Nicholas frowned after he'd said it, and stared at his free hand. Pursing his lips, he felt inside him for the river that'd been there earlier. This time he knew it was there before he fell in. As he mentally stepped into the shallows, the light at his hands flared and then, with a thought, extinguished. He flexed his fingers a few times before calling it back again.

Jun watched from the other side of the staircase, face as impassive as a brick wall. "Basic. Right," he said after a moment.

"Sorry." Nicholas put out both fires and slipped the torc into his back pocket. "What's up?"

"Been looking for you." Jun leaned back against another of the columns, seemingly unbothered by the roses and their thorns. He cast a look up into the black void above. It thundered still, though no rain had fallen. Yet. As though to emphasize it's promise, lightning struck off in the distant hills. "Hadn't seen you all day."

Nicholas settled back into his thorn-clear spot and hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his pants. For a moment he chewed on his lip, then said, "I got lost."

"Down there?"

Nicholas glanced along Jun's line of sight, back toward the village and the castle. He sighed and nodded. "Close 'nuff."

Scratching at his dreads, Nicholas bit his bottom lip. "Y'ever still have those flashes? Get so lost in the past it all seems more real'n what's now."

"It's hard not to." Jun thumped his heel at the base of one column and shook his curls out of his eyes. "Ken's all on this coronation thing. Figures we may as well get it over with."

Thinking back on the shade of Beverly he'd run into, Nicholas shivered and nodded. Together, the two mounted the stair. At the top, Jun asked, "It was for her, wasn't it?"

Pulling it back out of his pocket, Nicholas turned the disjointed torc in one hand, then nodded. "Yeah. Before I knew."

He thought for a moment that Jun might let it go at that. When the other boy looked up, though, Nicholas recognized more than a little of Jadeite in those bright blue eyes. "He never did ask; how long did it take to figure it out?"

The part of him which was Nephrite glowered and ground his teeth. Nicholas jerked a step backward and shook his head to clear it. When the anger had passed, he met those eyes again and realized that they weren't accusing, only curious. It was, after all, a reasonable question. "Too long," Nicholas replied thickly.

Jun nodded. He threw a companionable arm about Nick's shoulders as they went for the temple entrance.

Zoe, Keanu, and Helios were bent over a collection of books in the dining hall. Rather than use the dais the trio had reclaimed a table near to it. Between a few scattered candles, and Helios' horn, the place was bright enough. Keanu wasn't pulling his usual glowworm, Nicholas noticed. "There you are," their leader said without looking up.

He shut the book he'd been reading, and steepled his fingers. "Alright then, lets get this over with."

Helios set his quill aside and sanded the parchment he'd been writing on. "You're certain?"

"Sure." Keanu rubbed at the corners of his eyes.

"What're we doin'?"

Zoe stretched as she sat up; her back popped. "Resettling the throne, apparently. I still say we ought to do this properly."

"There's really no point," Keanu said with a shrug. His eyes were rimmed in darkness and there was a tightness at the corners of his mouth that suggested a lack of sleep. That would make sense, Nicholas thought, but it didn't bode well that even their "fearless leader" was having trouble keeping himself together these days. "I waited for Nick. I don't see why we should put this off any longer."

The girl rolled her eyes. She looked to the newcomers as they both found seats. "He hasn't had a chance to hear this yet."

When Keanu waved a hand at her, she continued, "I was just thinking that all the spirits seem so pissed off, that, y'know, maybe they won't be if they think we're doing something."

Jun leaned a cheek upon one hand, and swatted a curl out of his vision. "And some stupid ceremony is 'doing something,' apparently."

Nicholas wasn't sure how Jun ignored the pout that Zoe cast his way, but the boy didn't seem at all bothered. Then again, there wasn't much that ever seemed to bother Jun—save Bachiko. Unbidden, Beverly's face rose into his mind's eye. "Maybe Z's gotta point. It don't seem like much, but they're awful bent on these stupid rules and what not, least so far as I can tell. If we play to 'em, they might get off our backs some."

They all looked up, and if Zoe seemed a little surprised at his agreement Nicholas figured he couldn't entirely blame her. It wasn't often that she and Jun were at odds, and less so that she and Nicholas saw eye to eye. Keanu frowned, glancing between the two of them. Jun shrugged when their leader's gaze fell to him, and then Keanu turned to Helios. "Do you know what a formal ceremony would entail?"

"No." Helios leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest.

"I do," Zoe said. "Don't you remember? We attended Nephrite's."

They had, he realized after she'd said it. It was a dim memory; you'd think something that important would come in crystal clear, but all Nicholas could see in his mind's eye were a pair of green eyes and a memory of sword-calloused hands. His crown didn't matter at all.

Keanu was saying, "Not...really, no. It's foggy. Wouldn't it be different, anyway, for the high king?"

Zoe threw her hands up. "So? It's better than nothing, okay? We have to appease them somehow."

"We'd have to do it at the castle," Helios reminded them.

They all shuddered. Across the table from Nicholas, Keanu put his face in his hands, and scrubbed them back over his white-striped hair. The memory of the bodies swinging from the parapet was all too clear, for all of them. Nicholas settled back against his chair and scratched the scruff of his neck. "We gotta sometime, anyway. Why don't we get 'em down, give 'em a proper burn, and get this over with? Storms're gonna keep coming until we do something."

"That's why I want to do this now, instead of making a production of it," Keanu grumbled.

"I guess it'd be good for morale," Jun muttered. He'd gone a bit white at the mention of burning the bodies of their old mentors. Nicholas hoped he'd get over that one soon. Soon enough they'd be facing the fire witch again, and Jun needed to be steady for that.

"Three-to-one." Zoe slapped the table. "Lets get this done first thing tomorrow, and—"

"So we're a democracy now?" All eyes turned upon Keanu, who had sat up straight to snap at the girl. His cheeks darkened under their scrutiny. After a moment, he stood. "Fine. Tomorrow. I'm gonna go crash."

Silence drifted in his wake until they were certain he'd really gone. Zoe sighed. "Thanks for backing me up, guys."

"Dinnit do it for you." Nicholas drummed his fingers on the table, and shrugged. "S'good idea. But I think maybe we should take care'a the bodies, 'stead of him," he paused long enough to jerk a hand between himself and Jun, "Ain't as bad for us."

The blond boy looked at him, expression as void as ever. He didn't argue, though, and Nicholas took it to be a good sign. It was the truth, anyway, even if Jun didn't want it pointed out.

"The pyres should be built in the central courtyard," said Helios. He uncrossed his arms long enough to take a sip from the goblet set before him on the table. "If you intend to send them off in state."

"We do." Jun got up and left.

"Jun," called Zoe. Reaching out, Nicholas caught her wrist before she could go after the boy. The skin under his fingers was puckered; she stopped cold.

"Leave him alone for a tick, huh? Shit. Kid has enough issues without you nannying after him."

Zoe jerked her wrist away. "Mind your own business." When she left, she went the opposite direction that Jun had; that was good enough. Helios excused himself a moment later.

Alone in the tomb-like dining hall, Nicholas opened the fist which still held onto Jupiter's torc. He put it on the table before him and stared at it.

They passed around the mansion belonging to the Northern Kingdom, and slowed to a halt. Before them unfolded the broken gates of Valeia, over an overflowing moat choked with weeds, and backed against charred, crumbling walls. Six bodies dangled from the parapet, and the crows above them cawed their guard.

Nicholas, Helios, and Jun picked their way over the half-rotted gate, under the portcullis, and into the guard tower. Zoe, Keanu, and the shrine maidens would build the pyres.

Castle guardsmen and invaders laid fallen atop one another throughout the tower. Only Helios gave pause to clap a hand over his mouth and reaffirm his stomach; he was the only one of them whom hadn't spent much time amongst the decay. Nicholas would have gone on without the priest, but Jun caught his arm to make him wait. Together, the children picked their way over the corpses and ignored the spirits leering at them from the shadows.

Light drifted in through arrow slots in the outer wall, glinting off dust motes dancing through the air. If it weren't for stench, and the bodies, the derelict tower may have been pretty. He wondered if this was what the castles in Europe were like—the ones that had been abandoned.

Nicholas left the door open when he came out along the walkway. It was windy up this far, but the fresh air felt good despite the cold. Jun shivered. Down the pathway a collection of crows waited for them, cawing and pecking at the stone. Near to them, four ropes were tied to a series of merlons. Covered in bird shit.

The crows raised their hackles and cried defiance as they approached. "How do we-" began Helios as they slowed to a halt. The rest of his question was drowned out by a startled cawing and roar of flapping wings.

Nicholas threw an arm up to protect his face, then frowned at the retreating flock. "The fuck?"

Jun smirked as he passed the other two. "Guess they figured this wasn't a place they wanted to be." It seemed Nicholas wasn't the only one getting a handle on his powers.

One-by-one they hauled the corpses up onto the parapet walk and laid each along the back of it. The skies overhead were dark, and lightning crackled to the east. "The weather doesn't even want us to get this done," muttered Nicholas. Jun scoffed, and maybe Nicholas imagined the agreement in that.

Hematite was the hardest to pull up; even as a pecked-over corpse, the giant weighed a ton. His body sprawled over the walk and Nicholas cast a dubious eye at the stairs they'd come up. It was going to be hell trying to cart him down that.

Next came Kalunite; were it not for the epaulets still attached to the shoulders of his uniform, they'd not have known him. Carefully, they set the Northern King next to his fellow.

Both Nicholas and Jun had to pause after they'd laid Hiddenite beside his fellows. In his mind's eye, Nicholas remembered the man's entrails spread down the servant's stair. He could hear the soft gasps for breath, Hiddenite's last command to him. There had been no reason to hang this man; he'd already been dead.

Three were left. Swallowing thickly, they steeled themselves and returned to the ropes. Up came a familiar head of curls, his face crumbled and uniform half gone to time. Jun was pale as he laid Zoicite's body neatly upon the walk. The degradation of Zoicite's uniform revealed the stitches where the castle healer had sealed up the wounds on the corpse, before it had been put on display to mourn. Before it had been thrown over the parapet and hung.

Then came Beryl, her matted red hair streaming behind her like a flag. Jun backed away the moment she was safely on the curtain wall, leaving Helios and Nephrite to settle her upon the stone. Nicholas glanced up in time to see the snarl on Jun's lips, the glare he leveled at her abused corpse. Wordless, Nicholas moved to bring up the last.

This was one he did not know, and there were no markings on the body that rung bells for it. Even Helios looked puzzled as they put the corpse aside. "What other noble would they bother to hang?"

Jun shrugged. "Why would they bother to hang any of them? Two of them were already dead."

"'Cause they could," Nick guessed. He knelt beside the unknown figure and tried to piece together the shreds of rags that still bound it. Not much was left, and what was was covered in thick grime. Without any sort of marking symbol, such as Kalunite's epaulet, the identity was impossible to ascertain. Nicholas looked up, glancing both ways along the parapet walk. For once there were no spirits lingering about the corpses.

Shaking off the chill that tingled down his spine, Nicholas stood. "I'da done the same to them. Wouldn't you?"

Jun said nothing, and Helios winced away from the pair of them.

Getting the bodies from the walk to the ground floor was as painstaking and laborious a process as Nicholas had imagined it would be. In the end, they were forced to move the corpses of the fallen guardsmen first, putting them as carefully as possible to the sides of the rooms. Though the boys tried to keep the guardsmen separate from the invaders, one or two mis-sorted corpses resulted in shades that followed them around the tower until they stopped to correct the problem. It was mid-afternoon by the time they'd finished, or so they judged on the rare moments the sun was visible through the cloud cover.

Tossing the curls from his eyes with a shake of his head, for he seemed reluctant to touch his hair given the mess on his hands, Jun frowned up at the clouds again, then kicked the ground with the toe of his sneaker. The others had erected a single pyre, long and wide, before the steps to the keep. More accurate to tradition would have been six separate pyres, laid out in order of rank. If they had the time or resources...they didn't, Nicholas told himself firmly.

The pyre was constructed mainly of old furniture, with a long table at it's center to hold the bodies. They'd tossed broken chairs and staffs and an assortment of things which looked like pieces of bed frames or tables beneath it, with an arrangement of sticks, logs, and dried up bushes from the back gardens. Each corpse had been laid on the table shoulder-to-shoulder with its peers, including the one that none of them could identify. Maybe they had been a noble, maybe not; the children no longer cared.

When they brought the bodies, Zoe kept her eyes firmly fastened upon the keep, or the ground, or the pyre itself. She would not look at her former self, instead wrapping her arms about her chest as she stood to one side.

Keanu came to help with Hematite's body. He lofted the shoulders, and Helios the middle, and Nicholas the feet, as they hoisted the giant onto the table. When it was done, Keanu stood by his head a moment, staring into the hideous mask of death.

A shriek tore him away.

Bachiko fell to her knees fingers half-curled over her lips and sobbing. One trembling hand reached out to brush the ruined remains of Beryl's hair. "Shit," Keanu muttered, and started back across the courtyard to the gate where they'd left the body. Nicholas followed.

There'd been a unanimous decision to leave Bachiko behind. It hadn't been hard—she tended to sleep irregularly, and had been up much of the night according to the twins who roomed with her. Perhaps they should have left one to babysit after all.

Keanu stopped a few paces from the pair, watching the tears stream down Bachiko's cheeks. His lips fumbled for words, then he snorted. Nicholas stepped around him to kneel beside her. He extended a hand to her shoulder then wrapped it about her back. Bachiko immediately leaned into him, and pressed her wet face to his neck. Slowly, carefully, Nicholas urged her to her feet and walked Bachiko to the pyre. Behind them, Keanu and Helios picked up the Queen to carry her to her resting place.

Dodona, who had a small talent for the elemental, lit the pyre. They stood at a short distance and watched as it rapidly went from a few sparks to a roaring bonfire. As the corpses disappeared into the flame, the shrine maidens began to sing. Though he'd have said, were he asked, that he didn't remember the words, Nicholas and all his fellows soon joined the hymn.

Tradition bade them stay until the flames were exhausted. Though his legs went to jelly, and his feet ached, Nicholas stood his silent vigil. They had stationed themselves-either by design or instinct-to their cardinal points. He and Bachiko stood to the west, arms about each other and her cheek against his chest. To the south were Keanu and Helios, and the House-less maidens behind them. Zoe stood alone to the North. Even in this light, Nicholas thought her eyes vacant and wistful. Did she see the pyre or the past, he wondered.

Fire obscured Jun from his sight most of the time, and for that Nicholas was thankful. When he did see the boy, orange through the flame and heat, he saw only pain and barely restrained rage. Nicholas had been held by such a glare before.

Distant now were the funerals he'd attended for his grade-school classmates, but he could still remember them. His mother had drug him to all six, no matter the glares and the whispers and the stares. He'd stood still, had not said a word, as he watched six small coffins disappear into the ground. The dirt. The mud infested with bugs and worms. And he remembered, even then, the grade-school chant that he and his classmates had all delighted in: _do you ever think as a hearse goes by that maybe you'll be the next to die?_

Somehow the families had all known. Maybe the bus driver had told them of the fit he'd thrown that day. Maybe she'd thought to herself, when she heard the semi's horn, that that was why the brat had screamed, and fought, and bit. Maybe he was still angry that no one had listened.

They stood vigil through the night, as the sky quaked above. Nicholas had expected it would rain on them—that they'd all be caught in the same trap he and Keanu had fallen victim to. But it didn't, and come the first light of morning the pyre was naught more than smoking ash.

"Helios?" Keanu looked to the priest beside him, his breath fogging. Bachiko slowly righted herself, and Nicholas shivered at the loss of her body heat.

The priest nodded and lifted his gaze to the door of the keep. Nicholas kept an arm curled about his...about Bachiko as he lead her to the north. Jun moved around from the other side, and there they paused with Zoe to wait on Helios and Keanu. It seemed only fitting that those two should be the first to enter the keep.

A grating of metal greeted them as the doors to the great hall swung inward. Once, a green carpet would have lined the center of the hall from the doors to the dais at its end. Tatters remained here and there, tossed to wind and time, but for the spirits and demons whom awaited them the space remained as an empty line leading their way inward.

Keanu squared his shoulders and strode in. The others followed at his heel and tried to keep their chins aloft.

Some of the spirits remained human in appearance, more still were twisted into shapes and colours that made no sense on a living being. Nicholas tried not to look too closely. Instead, he focused on the throne and pretended he could not hear Beverly's rasping among the crowd. A mist stirred about it as they approached.

The children stopped before the alter as the mist dissolved itself into three figures. Bachiko pulled from Nicholas' grasp to mount the steps.

Beryl took her place beside her peers, behind the throne of the High King. Hiddenite, Hematite, and Kalunite looked on, silent as the graves they'd risen from, while Beryl cast her gaze upon them. "Claim the throne if you must," she said to Keanu. "But you are still missing one."

Nicholas winced, even as Keanu muttered, "Shit." The ghost-giant of Kunzite's father raised a burly eyebrow.

"I'll take his place," said Helios.

Keanu frowned. "You—"

"I will respect your authority, Keanu," Helios whispered just loudly enough that the three behind them could hear. "If you respect my neutrality."

After a glance at their only alternative, Keanu nodded. "For now, Helios will hold the South."

"A conflict of interest, some might say," Beryl began.

Jun snorted, "And you would not be?"

None of the spirits seemed inclined to speak for themselves, but Nicholas thought he felt a stir at that. Something beyond the usual anger. Beryl's back straightened, and she glared Jun. Keanu took a slow step forward, and then another, and another until he reached the throne.

"Helios," he said, and the priest climbed the stair to stand beside the throne.

On the dais, Helios turned to the assembled, his back straight and chin high; it was belied by the shaking of his hands, Nicholas noted, and could not blame him. The priest took a deep breath, then looked to Keanu. "Do you, Kunzite of the Southern House, solemnly promise to govern the Elysion and all it's peoples according to its laws and custom?"

"I solemnly promise to do so," replied Keanu, who had only barely masked his flinch at the title.

"And will you swear to maintain justice, law, and mercy in all your rulings?"

"I swear."

"Will you maintain the law of Gaea, and unto Her offer your first loyalties?"

"I will," replied Keanu. "All these things I have promised, and will keep in the name of Gaea, until she calls me to Her."

Another stirring of emotion from the crowd, and Nicholas was almost beginning to think it pleasant. Was that even possible?

They didn't have a crown, but Helios had begun to glow a soft, golden light. He clasped Keanu's hand and the energy surrounding him extended up Keanu's arm, then over the boy's whole body. For a moment he stood like the sun itself before the throne, before the energy blinded them.

Blinking spots from his eyes, Nicholas dropped his arm to find Keanu slumped upon the throne and the spirits gone. Keanu's hair had been salt-and-pepper a moment before, now it was naught but white. Some healthy colour had returned to his skin; it'd been ashen since their incident at the jeweler's. But when Keanu looked up, Nicholas could still see a weariness still in the boy's eyes.

Zoe turned a circle, peering into the darker corners for signs of the demons. "Looks clear," she said after a moment, and frowned. "Did you guys see..."

"The old kings?" Nicholas nodded. "They were here."

"But I thought..." Zoe shook her head and glanced out the doors behind them.

A few birds chirped, tentatively, in the rafters. It was then that Nicholas realized there were streams of light peeking in through holes in the ceiling. Turning, he strode out of the keep until he stood on the steps, looking up at the beautiful morning beyond. The clouds weren't gone, not yet, but they were breaking up and vivid sunlight shown through. It was still cold; winter was still coming. Yet, for the first time, Nicholas thought that things might actually be okay. They could get through this, at least.

Everyone went off on their own when they returned to the temple. Nicholas' entire body ached, and it wasn't just for a night without sleep. He locked the door to his room, though he knew it wouldn't matter if Bachiko wanted him, and all but fell onto his pallet. He groaned.

Reaching a hand beneath him, Nicholas fumbled until he managed to drag the torc out of his back pocket where it had been, forgotten, for two days. For a moment, he considered simply tossing it aside, but then his fingers stuck to the metal like they'd been glued there and he reconsidered.

He took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. With the air, he reached for his energy and once again the ghostly green fire surrounded them. In the light, he twisted the pieces of the necklace until they fit together, showing the carefully crafted woodland scene Porthos had scultped. He traced the back of the deer with one thumb, then, on a whim, sat up long enough to clasp the necklace around his neck.

Settled back again, Nicholas closed his eyes and gave in to sleep.

Today she waited for him, pacing back and forth through the flowers. Though her hands were fists at her side, and her lips were pressed in worry, he offered her a grin when she looked up. It belied the weary nagging at the back of his mind that something was well and truly wrong; something worse than what he'd come to tell her.

Stopping long before he reached her, Nephrite let his grin flag. "There's something wrong."

Girasol nodded. The woman stared down at herself—her abused leather boots and well-worn tunic—then turned and sat on a nearby rock. Instantly, her heel began to tap wildly against the ground. "We need to talk."

The urge to take a peek was there again, and stronger than ever. Nephrite slipped the bow from his shoulder and moved closer to her before crouching in the grass. He laid his bow beside him and leaned his elbows upon his knees. "Yeah, we really do. You first."

"Why me?"

"Because you said so first." He attempted a smile.

Chuckling faintly, Girasol nodded. "That's fair. There's something you should know, about Ceylonese...and me."

"You're not farmer's daughters."

Girasol went stock still. Her eyes met his and neither seemed to dare to breath. There it was again, he thought, that warrior's stance. He'd seen the same look in Kunzite's eyes a thousand times, when the man was confronted by an opponent on the practice field or in battle. Like him, she did not relax, not really, but she seemed to be aware of how tense she'd gone, for in another instant she'd sat up straight and deliberately fidgeted as though to cover it up. As though he wouldn't have noticed.

"How did you—"

"You don't talk like farmer's girls." Nephrite looked up at her. The familiar, comforting burn itched beneath his skin, and through it, and toward her. It was met by something foreign and he withdrew. No, she couldn't be, he told himself. His heart was crawling slowly into his throat.

"Neither do you."

He had the grace to look ashamed, if only slightly. Wetting his lips, Nephrite nodded. "There's...a lot I haven't said. I didn't think—well, that isn't important, now. What's important is that we cannot allow our friends to become any more acquainted than they have become."

"It's a little late for that," she muttered.

Nephrite swallowed thickly. He sat back and rubbed one temple. "Regardless, it must end now."

Girasol frowned at her boots. "I know my reasons for thinking that. What are yours?"

He eyed her again, and the gulf he'd felt between them the last few weeks widened further. Nephrite wished there were a way to bridge it, and yet he grew ever certain that there never would be. Their eyes met in his silence.

Surging to her feet, the woman glowered him; his fingers touched the hilt of his dagger. "Who is Ilia? Who are you?"

Standing as well, Nephrite remained otherwise still as his huntress took a step away from him. She nearly tripped over the rock behind her, but winced away when he reached out to stop her. "I could ask you the same, 'Girasol'."

For one long, uncomfortable moment they glared at one another. The only scrap which remained of their once strong rapport, it seemed, was her ability to read him. "He's...He can't be."

The huntsman scowled in another direction and Girasol hung her head. "Her name—Celonese's real name—is Serenity."

It was as though the world were filtered through the ocean. Her words hit him, one by one, and filtered through the static that had become his brain. Sagging, Nephrite carded one hand through his wild dark hair and took a step away from her. "And you? What of you?"

"Jupiter."

His stomach bottomed out even as the river of power tossed inside of him. It flared and brushed the thing he'd felt about her earlier—foreign, yes. Foreign and cruel. "Jupi-You allowed her to come down here? _Her _of all people?"

Jupiter's fists closed again as she raised her chin at him. "It was harmless. Besides, how was I to know that two princelings would gallivant about disguised as huntsmen in their own land? You—you... Agh." The guardian turned on a heel and stalked a few steps into the meadow. "This is impossible."

"Says the poacher."

She whirled and jabbed a finger at him, but her eyes glittered in the sunset light. "You didn't have a problem with that a few days ago!"

"I forgave a girl trying to feed her family," Nephrite reminded her in a whisper. "Not..."

Swallowing thickly, he looked away. "We need a plan. This cannot continue."

"I can't hide this anymore," she said after a moment. The anger seemed to dwindle as quickly as it come, and she swayed in place. Jupiter rubbed a chilled arm. "And we can't do this anymore."

"Obviously."

She looking back at him, their eyes met again. After a strained moment, Jupiter backed away from him step by step, pace by pace, until she finally turned to run. Nephrite watched her go. His bow was next to him, and his arrows on his back. He should have taken them up and stopped it then. A well placed mark would have ended it all.

Or maybe it'd just have begun sooner.


	3. Intermission: Makoto

**MAKOTO**  
><em>October 2009. Tokyo, Japan<em>

Nothing had been right since that terrible night. In a single moment, Makoto felt like their world had been tossed right back into the turmoil of their youth. How long had it been since they'd seen a true enemy? How long since one of their own had last fallen?

Not long enough.

And yet, here she was, sitting in her best friend's living room...watching television.

It occurred to her that they hadn't taken much of anything too seriously when they were kids. Sure, those final few battles were met with appropriate stoicism, but up until it got to that point it was always light banter and day-to-day drama in between the little scuffles with the enemy. Makoto couldn't help but wonder if those battles might not have been so hard if they'd just put a little more effort into locating and destroying their enemies when they first saw them, rather than always waiting for the villains to force their hands.

_That was the past_, she reminded herself, _you can't change the past_.

She just wished there were more she could do than couch surf. A sigh from the stairwell seemed to echo that sentiment. Makoto looked up as Ami dropped onto the couch next to her. "How is he?"

"Stable," said the doctor, pinching the bridge of her nose between thumb and index finger. "Sleeping again."

Nodding, Makoto muted the TV and turned to look at her friend. Dark circles rimmed Ami's eyes, and her hair hung limp around her face. Ami hadn't been to work in days, though that was as much a part of her "sick leave" as the fact that she'd been guesting here since the attack. Frowning, Makoto reached for her friend's hand. "Ami-chan. Why don't you go take a bath? I've got dinner tonight, and you could use a break, ne?"

"I don't know what's wrong with him," Ami muttered, staring at the ceiling. Then she got up and wandered toward the bathroom. The question plaguing Makoto's mind nearly sprung to her lips, but she bit down on it. No. Ami had enough to worry about without Makoto adding _that _to the mix. Shaking her head, she rose in kind, and went for the kitchen. She'd brought groceries in with her that afternoon, and had already set a pot of rice to cooking.

It took a moment to get the ingredients out again and sorted. Makoto knew this kitchen by heart, and her body moved around it of its own accord, taking a cutting board from its proper cabinet and finding a knife. Soon there was no sound in the house but her steady chopping of vegetables.

_Aotea_. The name had come whispered to her in the night, driving her from sleep as surely as the frantic beeping of her communicator. It'd been driven again from memory when she heard Usagi crying, and the several days of fear and tension that followed. But when no further attack had come, the dreams began again stronger than before, and sticking to her when she woke.

Were they dreams? She peeled the seeds from a bell pepper and considered that. No, she didn't believe they were; not exactly. If Rei were here...but she wasn't. Rei and Minako had gone to the States to try and track down the boy Minako believed to be Kunzite's reincarnation. It wasn't much of a lead—no lead at all, really—but after scouring Japan for Zoicite and Jadeite had turned up nothing it was all they had to go on.

And Mamoru...

Makoto glanced at the empty stairwell, listening for a moment to the quiet of the house. Small Lady, accompanied by Artemis, had been sent off to her grand parent's. Luna might have gone with Small Lady as well, but she hadn't been feeling well lately and thought that Usagi might need her more. She was right, of course. Usagi refused to leave Mamoru's side for all but the most necessary of reasons. Probably not even that if Ami hadn't threatened her with an adult diaper.

Mamoru had woken two days after the attack, though only for a short time. He'd been left weak as a newborn babe, and just managed to get down a good cup of hearty broth before returning to sleep. Ami had hooked him to the Mercury Computer to monitor his vitals. Somehow, despite all logic and reason, the ancient device did as good a job as modern hospital equipment, if not better.

For one thing, it only ever beeped if there was a problem. So far there hadn't been; other than what they could observe for themselves, Mamoru registered as being perfectly healthy. Despite that, the man was bedridden, too weak to speak or move much. He knew who they were, or sometimes seemed to. Often, in the odd moments he was awake, Makoto wondered if he really saw them. His gaze was unfocused, muddy, and not at all like the sharp-witted man she'd come to love as a brother.

Setting the knife aside, Makoto dusted her hands off on a rag, and found a mixing bowl for the tempura batter.

One might think she wouldn't want to be in a kitchen after spending ten hours at the restaurant, yet this was the one thing she was sure of anymore—cooking. It was so simple, so familiar. In a world where they'd been betrayed by someone no one could quite believe had attacked them, where old enemies were being found in innocent children, and where her own head was attacking her with blasphemous visions of the past, Makoto could still be certain she made the best tempura on earth. Jupiter, too.

"Is that octopus I smell?"

Luna hopped onto the end of the counter, keeping clear of the cutting board and it's raw vegetables. She knew very well how Makoto felt about cat hair near food.

"Here," said Makoto, as she cut a section of tentacle away and deposited it on the tile in front of the cat. A loud, steady purr began as Luna nibbled at the meat. Returning to her work, Makoto stared down at the batter as she mixed it in slow swirls. "Luna..."

"Yes?"

"You don't think Helios would really do this, do you?" The question even surprised Makoto, but once it'd left her lips she couldn't feel sorry for having asked it. No matter that the cat sighed and left off on her snack.

"I don't know what to think," Luna said after a moment. Her ears laid back, and she shook her head. "I certainly wouldn't have expected it. I only wish Usagi would tell us why."

They hadn't gotten much out of Usagi, other than a name and something about the shitennou. It hadn't made any sense at all. So far the senshi had concluded that Helios had come to the house in the middle of the night, prompted by the shitennou, and somehow caused Endymion to collapse.

Once again Rei's divinations had proven suddenly useless. None of them was so frustrated with this failure as Rei. Though the priestess hadn't said as much, her stony silence when she'd returned from the shrine had said as loudly as if she'd screamed it that she blamed herself for everything. They were all beginning to realize just how much they had relied on that power

Ami had tried using the Mercury Computer to analyze the room as well. The computer had detected faint traces of Helios' power, recognizing the imprint from their dealings with him many years before, but nothing further. No hint of how he'd come, or gone, or what exactly had been done.

"If she even knows," said Makoto.

"I think she does," Luna replied, softly. Glancing up, the cat offered her a semblance of a shrug—as close as she could get, anyway. "It's just a feeling, but I cannot shake it. She knows, she just doesn't want to."

Makoto wished that didn't make sense. As much as Usagi had a penchant for unreasonable amounts of trust, she also had a penchant to deny when that trust had been broken. Besides, Makoto couldn't believe she'd be in any better state had it been her husband. Not that she had a husband...

The memory of a slow, kind grin across a handsome face intruded upon her thoughts. With a fierce shake of her head, she cleared it again from her mind. No, she told herself firmly, as an uncomfortable feeling rolled in her stomach. No.

"Are you all right?"

Luna was staring at her, now, concern written in the cat's posture. It was strange how used she'd gotten to reading cat body language, wasn't it? Makoto smiled faintly, and shook her head again with less zest this time. "I'm fine," she lied. She needed a pan.

Going to the cabinet for one, Makoto said, "How are you feeling?"

"Better, a bit. Hungry." The cat laughed at herself, and if it sounded a little hollow Makoto couldn't blame her.

"Good," Makoto pronounced with a grin. When Luna finished the first tendril, Makoto gave her another with a wink. Their conversation turned to much more mundane matters as Makoto finished the tempura, and they were both grateful for the respite.

Ami reappeared long enough to eat, before Makoto sent her right on to bed. For once, Ami didn't try to protest. That done, Makoto made up a tray for Usagi and headed upstairs. Balancing the tray on one hand, Makoto slid their bedroom door open.

The princess was curled on her knees beside the bed, with her head pillowed in her arms beside Mamoru. Usagi's long, white-blonde hair was loose, streaming behind her and draped over her feet in a plush pile.

"Usa-chan?"

Usagi stirred, then turned to blink owlishly at her friend. "Is that domburi?"

"Good nose as always," Mako smiled. Dropping to her knees, she settled the tray beside her friend. After gathering her hair away from the food, Usagi fully turned to face Makoto and settled, cross legged, before the tray. A ghost of a smile flickered across her lips.

"Thank you." Raising the rice-and-tempura dish near to her mouth, Usagi stuffed a few hearty bites into her mouth. At least her appetite was normal, Makoto thought. She let her eyes roam up to where Mamoru slept. As she watched, his brow furrowed and gave a soft moan.

Immediately, Usagi's eyes riveted back to her husband. He stilled again, and, after a long moment, Usagi returned to her meal with slumped shoulders.

They stayed that way until Usagi finished and set the bowl back on the tray. Makoto picked it up and rose. She was at the door before Usagi said, "I don't understand."

Looking back, Makoto found Usagi staring at her, her big blue eyes bright in the lamp light. "I don't understand, Mako-chan," she repeated. "He said Endymion did something. That he wasn't a prince anymore."

For a long while the pair stared at one another as Makoto tried to wrap her mind around that statement. Then, slowly, Usagi faced the bed again, and rested her cheek back upon folded arms. "Thank you for being here, Mako-chan."

"Of course." Makoto slid the door shut behind her.

The hallway was hazy, lit only by the phosphorescent tendrils of vine that had been carefully sculpted into swirling patterns on the high ceiling. Outside the arched windows was a freezing, inky darkness you'd lose your own nose in. Such were the nights of the moon kingdom, at least this time of year. How could something so familiar seem so...foreboding.

That was the question of the day, though, wasn't it? Jupiter's gaze drew itself back to the double doors she'd only just shut. In her mind's eye she could see the chamber behind it, empty as the night. There was no question of where the Princess had gone, and what she was duty bound to do now. Arms wrapped about herself, Jupiter turned and went to find Venus.

The tray clattered against the floor. Makoto caught herself with a hand against the wall, her other pressed to her brow.

"Mako-chan?" The bedroom door wobbled as it was jerked open. Then Usagi's hands were on her back and arm. Luna came bounding up the stairs, ears pert, and stopped at the landing.

"What's going on?"

"I'm okay," Makoto said, and shook her head clear. She stood upright, and offered a slight smile, "I just...was a little dizzy..."

Her voice faded out as she stared into Usagi's eyes, and it dawned on her that Usagi knew she was lying. "I'll clean this up," Usagi said. "Do you need help downstairs?"

"No, I'm fine." Makoto feigned a laugh, and would have bent to pick up the mess had Usagi not already sunk to her knees to do so. For a moment, Makoto watched, then murmured a thanks and went down to the couch.

"You're not fooling anyone, you know," Luna announced downstairs. Sinking onto the couch, Makoto suppressed a sigh, instead favoring the cat with her best 'I-know-but-I-don't-want-talk-about-it-g

o-away-please' look. It either didn't convey, or Luna didn't care, for the cat jumped onto the couch beside her and stared.

"Do I have to call Minako—"  
>"I've been having these—"<p>

They each broke off, then Luna shook her head. "Go on."

Makoto's cheeks darkened at Luna's threat—_Call Minako? Like she's my mother?_—but she repeated as steadily as she could, "I've been having these...dreams."

Fidgeting with the hem of her sweater, Makoto settled back into the corner of the couch, and drew her feet up under her. "They started the night Mamoru was attacked. I've never had them while waking, though. Not like that." She scrubbed a hand over her face. "Luna, it was like I was on the moon! For a moment I standing in a hall of the palace. I could feel the air, knew my old thoughts. I was...I was Jupiter again. Completely."

The cat's eyes searched her own, then one of Luna's ears flicked backward as she looked away. "What was going on?"

A noise on the stair gave Makoto pause. She looked up to find Usagi standing at the middle landing, watching her. The woman descended after a moment, and set the tray she carried on the coffee table. Luna moved over so that Usagi could take the other end of the couch.

Makoto hesitated another moment, but the others continued to watch her expectantly. Suppressing a surge of annoyance, she pursed her lips. "Not much was going on, exactly. She—I was standing outside the Princess's door. The Princess snuck off to see Endymion again. I wasn't very happy about it."

That got a slight smile from Usagi. "You never were," she said, and a tight, hard knot formed in Makoto's stomach. "At least not after we knew."

"You remember?"

Usagi's eyes widened at Makoto's tone. She shook her head, then winced. "Some. Small things. I've...had a lot of time to think."

"Why didn't you mention this?"

"There's been a lot going on!" Usagi's frowned, her eyes a little bright in the glow of the still-muted television. She looked at the hands in her lap. "I wasn't sure it was relevant at first. It's just little, obvious things."

"That we don't remember," Makoto said.

Usagi pursed her lips, then nodded. "The others wouldn't, it was just me and you at first. You before me."

"Me."

Another nod. As she began to relate the story, what part Usagi knew, something seemed to click in the back of Makoto's mind. Her friend's voice seemed to drift away and in a sudden rush what had been alluding her came rushing back a frenzy of sights and sounds and laughter, of hidden smiles, desire, and treason.

It had begun with a dare.

Attendance of parties and balls were quite mandatory for the princess and her guardians, no matter how boring they might be. Not that they were allowed to express boredom. This was especially the case for important holidays, where the princess and her retinue were expected to hop from one Noble's ball to another's, often only able to stop long enough to make a toast and be on their way to the next highest ranking house. This Saturnalia was no different, and the girls and their entourage shared plenty a joke at the stuffy nobles' expenses over warm cider between houses.

Finally, they were able to settle down at the home of the Duchess Tranquility. While Princess Serenity was being waltzed about by various hopeful lords and ladies, Jupiter found herself, Mars, and several of the other sport-inclined young nobles in a corner discussing the best game trails. It was a common enough occurrence during Saturnalia, when the prime hunting season was just set to begin.

"The best hunting, of course, is found on Earth of all places. There are deer there the size of a commoner's shrine," Lord Iolaus was saying in a low voice, leaned into their crowd so as not to be overheard by other parties. His dark eyes twinkled mischievously in the candlelit ballroom, fastening upon Mars', though the Senshi didn't seem to notice or care.

"And how would you know?" Mars arched a dark brow, gesturing with the wine he'd brought her. For all that the pair got on one another's nerves, they showed a fair amount of civility in public. Jupiter thought that this was cute, and hid her smile with her own glass. Venus would be jealous, if only because she prided herself on how many men were swooning after her, and Iolaus only seemed to have eyes for his "enemy." "You've never even been there."

Iolaus' twin, Iphicles, smirked. "Have we not?"

A hush fell across the group as the twins shared a conspirital glance. Save for very limited, very exclusive trade contracts, contact with Earth had been forbidden for nearly two centuries. Lord Heracles, the twins' father, was one of those esteemed few, but common knowledge was that the Lord himself had never ventured to the planet's surface. Jupiter glanced at Mars, catching her friend's eye a moment, and frowned.

In a hushed voice, Lady Terentia asked, "You've been there, truly?" She leaned forward and added in a terrified whisper, "With the barbarians?"

Iphicles nodded, and Iolaus answered, "Many times. In fact, we just came back from our last expedition this past rotation. There's some new silks we've been discussing imp—"

He broke off at an elbow from his brother, then gave a sheepish grin. "Well, there are important business matters a-foot, let us say. But unrefined as the Terrans might be, I promise you their hunting is as we say. Not that they'll allow just anyone onto their best grounds."

Mars' eyes narrowed as she regarded Iolaus. Finally, she scoffed and rolled her eyes. "You don't really expect us to believe such tall tales, do you?"

"My Lady, I'm wounded," Iolas crooned. He pressed a hand to his chest. "Would I ever lie to you, sweet princess?"

"I'm not your sweet anything," Mars reminded him, though a faint lift to the corners of her mouth belied her snappish tone. "I know of the grounds of which you speak, and I cannot imagine their King, barbarian that he is, allowing foreign hunters onto his private lands. Even noble ones."

Especially noble ones, Jupiter thought. The Earth's distrust of foreigners was legendary. Merchants brought back as many stories of slight and rudeness from the Terrans as they did any trade good. No foreign dignitaries had been allowed onto the planet in over a hundred years, and every envoy the Queen had tried to send had been turned away. Forcefully, at one point not too long ago.

The twins' smiles did not flag. Iphicles glanced surreptitiously about before he said, "What makes you think he knows?"

Silence once more drifted upon their corner. No one dared breathe or move. Until Mars snorted. "You wouldn't have dared."

"Wouldn't we?" Iolaus lifted a brow. "I suppose you would."

Mars' chin lifted slightly. "It doesn't matter. We aren't likely to get any such chance, the way things stand."

But the twins' smiles, devilish and daring, said that they would.

Three days later, a small group of nobles snuck from the palace in the dead of the night. Their target was a small pavilion in the ruins along the southern coast of the sea of serenity. It wasn't a terribly far journey, especially on horseback, but all six of those involved were chilled to the bone by the time that they arrived.

"This has been here almost as long as the palace. Some old records we found say it used to serve as a transport between worlds. This one, specifically, went to Earth," explained Iolaus as he dismounted and tied his sorrel's reigns to a low tree branch. The others were doing much the same with their mounts, but Jupiter hesitated before she dismounted. What they were doing felt all the more dangerous now that it was a reality and not mere boasting. She caught Mars' eye as they went up the snow-dusted platform together. If her sister in arms had any doubts, they were well hidden. "We found it while exploring the woods on Earth one day. Surprised the hell out of us when it still worked."

A shiver of familiar power ran over her body when she reached the top of the pavilion. There were two others with them, other than the twins: Terentia and her beau, Cicero. The other senshi, should they be needed, were back in their beds asleep, completely unaware of this journey.

Looking up, Jupiter caught Iphicles giving her a knowing look, as though he sensed her hesitation. She squared her shoulders. "No hunter can guarantee a stag in a night's journey. You'll have to give us a few days."

Iphicles smirked. "We'll see. Once you get back."

He didn't dare challenge her so openly, but Jupiter heard the taunt all the same. "Fine. How do we activate it?"

The woods were dense, dark, and freezing. Winter set in earlier on Earth than it did on the Moon, and neither girl was prepared for the knee-deep snow. Neither did they like the sound of wolves in the distance.

"Wow," said Jupiter, her breath forming a thick cloud before her. The moon was huge in the night sky, silver and fat, and looking nothing like the home she knew. Mars stared as well, and rubbed her arms to keep them warm. They both fidgeted as another howl rose from the empty countryside. "Where are we?"

"Like I would know," Mars murmured. The moonlight was bright enough for them to see the pavilion they stood on, so like its twin upon the moon but for the fact that it was crumbling into time. Close by was the distinct sound of water lapping at a shore, and wind through the trees. Jupiter could smell no smoke, nor did she hear any sounds of civilization. With a little more confidence, the fire senshi said, "I think we're in a forest."

Another howl sent a shiver down Jupiter's back. The two glanced at one another, then Mars nodded. "We've made it to the surface," she said, slowly, "lets find some proof of that and be done with this."

"We're supposed to bring back a buck," Jupiter reminded her.

"Damn their buck," said Mars, with a roll of her eyes. "It was a stupid bet. We shouldn't have even come _this _far, and you know it. Besides, if they're as big as the boys say we'd be hard pressed to carry one back."

With a snap of her fingers a small flame appeared to hover over Mars' palm. The girl turn toward the forest, trotting smartly down the pavilion steps and into the snow. After a long moment, Jupiter followed.

They returned to the moon two hours later carrying a stone from some ruins they'd found in the Terran forest. The stone was covered in ancient Lunarian script, something that all parties were familiar with. Though the boys teased them for not bringing back a buck, Jupiter could not help but notice how pale all four of them had gone. None of them had really expected the senshi to go so far as they had.

The next time she returned to the pavilion it was daylight, and she was alone. Equipped in the oldest armour she had, in hopes of passing for a simple huntswoman, Jupiter vowed she'd return with a buck or not at all.

"I followed you," Usagi admitted, hands still clutched before her. Her gaze hadn't risen from the couch, but Makoto could sense that Usagi was still trying to gauge her reaction. "I was curious where you kept sneaking off to, and we ran into _him _before you could turn me back."

"Him?"

"Aotea. Nephrite." Makoto's blood seemed to turn to ice. In her mind's eye she saw those deep brown eyes, that slow smile, the way that the sunlight struck his sun kissed skin. Clutching her arms to her chest, Makoto closed her eyes and fought against the sudden need to throw up.

Heedless, Usagi continued, "You told him I was—"

"Ceylonese. My cousin." She swallowed thickly. "It was my fault."

"What?" Now Usagi's head snapped up, her blue eyes wide as plates. "No, Mako-chan—"

"Mako-chan," Luna said simultaneously, "You can't be serious."

"It was all my fault," Makoto whispered, but her voice was growing stronger with every word of it. The truth was like lightning rippling across her skin, delving into her mind and bursting down the door to her memories that had stood far too long. "Everything that happened. If I had just let it alone, walked away from that bet when Mars told me to..."

She got to her feet, shaking. Usagi began to stand as well, but Makoto held up a hand to stall her. "No. I just...I just need some air."

Without bothering to see Usagi's reaction, Makoto went for the door. She paused only long enough to put her on shoes and grab a jacket. It was freezing outside, and the horizon offered thunderheads. There was a strange comfort in that, Makoto thought as she wrapped her jacket about herself and went to lean against the far side of the fence, out of sight of anyone within the house. She didn't dare go far, not with an enemy afoot, but how she wanted to.

What would it be like, she wondered, to run away and never look back?

She'd been outside only about five minutes when a stiff wind sprung up, nearly knocking her flat. Makoto pushed her hair out of her face and looked up. Lightning cracked, nearly overhead now. That was fast—_too _fast. Electricity literally crackled down her arms now, like static cling visible to the naked eye.

Makoto took a step back toward the gate, then turned and ran, all thought of the past pushed from her mind. The door was barely shut before sheets of rain slammed against the house.


End file.
